Empire of Chance: The Napoleonic Wars and the Disorder of Things 9780674425415

Citation preview

empir e of ch a nce

empire of chance The Napoleonic Wars and the Disorder of Things

KL Anders Engberg-Pedersen

Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2015

Copyright © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printing Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Engberg-Pedersen, Anders. Empire of chance : the Napoleonic Wars and the disorder of things / Anders Engberg-Pedersen. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-96764-9 (alkaline paper) 1. Napoleonic Wars, 1800–1815. 2. Chance. 3. Coincidence. 4. Europe—History—1789–1815. 5. Military art and science—History—19th century. I. Title. DC226.3.E54 2015 940.2'7—dc23 2014028441

For Benjamin

Chance is the only legitimate king in the universe. —Napoleon

Contents

Introduction: The Prism of War

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KL 1 The Geometry of War: Siege Architecture and Narrative Form 10

2 State of War 1800: Topography and Chance

37

3 Modus Operandi: On Touch, Tact, and Tactics 69

4 Exercising Judgment: Technologies of Experience 103

5 Paper Empires: Military Cartography and the Management of Space 146

6 The Poetics of War: Cartography and the Realist Novel

184

x

contents Conclusion: The Disorder of Things 246

KL

Notes 253 Acknowledgments 313 Index 317

empir e of ch a nce

Introduction The Prism of War

L

et us accompany the recruit onto the battlefield,” writes Carl von Clausewitz in his unfinished magnum opus On War. “As we approach,” he continues,

the increasingly loud thunder of the cannon is followed by the howling of bullets, which attracts the attention of the inexperienced. Bullets begin to strike the ground close to us, before and behind. We run toward the hill where the commanding officer is positioned with his large retinue. Here the impact of the cannonballs and the explosion of shells become so frequent that the seriousness of life shatters the adolescent fantasy. Suddenly a friend falls to the ground—a shell explodes in the crowd and sets off a number of involuntary movements—you begin to feel that you are losing your calm and your composure.—Now one step further into the battle which is raging in front of us, still almost like a scene in a theatre, on to the next division general; here bullet follows bullet and the noise of the artillery increases your distraction. From the division general to the brigadier—a man of recognized valor, who stands cautiously behind a hill, a house or some trees;—a certain sign of the increasing danger—grapeshot rattles on the roofs of the houses and in the fields; cannonballs howl over us, and plough the air in all directions, and soon there is a frequent whistling of musket bullets; one step further toward the troops, toward the infantry that for hours has withstood a heated

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introduction attack with indescribable pertinacity; here the air is fi lled with the hissing of bullets that announce their proximity by a short sharp noise as they pass within an inch of the ear, the head, or the chest.

Clausewitz’s fiction leads us directly into the state of war.1 Immersing us into an imagined world, the text seeks to impart the virtual experience of the hazards and contingencies, the pervasive but elusive conditions that organize the world of war. Here, Clausewitz notes, deep inside the war matrix, “the light of reason moves through different media, it is broken into different rays than during speculative contemplation.”2 Returning from the battlefield, a number of writers and thinkers sought to come to grips with the phenomenon that had deflected the light of their minds. Imposing itself with a hitherto unseen force in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, from 1792 to 1815, warfare gave rise to a discourse across a number of fields and disciplines that grapples with war as a pervasive state or condition. Joseph de Maistre, writing in 1797, calls war the “habitual state of human kind,” peace serving merely as a brief respite.3 But how should we understand the state of war? What is the nature of the war matrix that formed the lives of a generation and has continued to shape the way modernity has been imagined? That is the concern of the present book. In the eighteenth century it was deemed barbarous to pose this question. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his fragment L’État de guerre (The State of War), drafted in the late 1750s, issues a vehement warning against a philosophical analysis of war: “Ah! Barbarous philosopher! Come and read your book to us on a battlefield!”4 Predicated upon his belief that the civil state corrupts the individual, he argues that civil institutions create war, perpetuate it, and legitimize it as a viable means of interaction between nations. Writing against Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, Rousseau nevertheless continues a tradition that conceives of the state of war from a juridical and political point of view. The “condition of Warre” that must be eliminated by subjection to an absolute sovereign in Leviathan, as well as the “State of War” that forms an aberration from the state of nature in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, form integral parts of theories of statecraft.5 Rousseau’s injunction against philosophizing about war is articulated from within this tradition. To make his point he too invents a fictive scenario that offers a graphic description of the savage violence of war. In Rousseau’s fiction the pristine order of

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legal books and political treatises concocted in the calmness of the writer’s study meets the brutal realities of war. For Rousseau the state of war as a political concept promotes another state of war, one conceived as butchery and suffering.6 With the Napoleonic Wars, however, a different understanding of war appears. While legal and political aspects as well as the human costs continue to be debated, around 1800 one can detect the emergence of a discourse on war as a problem of knowledge. What can be known, what is the status of information, what operational logic governs the war matrix? What epistemic order can make sense of it? What is the role of chance, and how is chance represented, how is it controlled and managed? These are some of the questions that begin to guide the discourse on war. The Napoleonic Wars not only instituted “a new order of things,” as Heinrich von Kleist put it, at the political level.7 War itself constituted a new and distinct order, an order that did not form a temporary exception in the lives of many of these thinkers but that organized the world in which they moved and breathed.8 It was the environment in which they were immersed. As Clausewitz’s statement indicates, war was now conceived as a prism that splintered the makeup of the world, that reconfigured fundamental spatiotemporal categories, and whose deflection of traditional modes of thought revealed an elusive phenomenon that called for a new theory of knowledge. Contrary to Rousseau’s division of labor, in which philosophers had sequestered themselves from the realities on the ground, the returning soldiers sought to describe the state of war as they themselves had experienced it inside the war matrix, in the thick of things on the battlefield. The inquiry into the state of war takes place not only and not primarily in works of philosophy as traditionally conceived. Since the beginning of Western thought, the preferred site for the articulation and establishment of knowledge and truth has been peace and order, while war has frequently been excluded from the realm of knowledge as a disturbance or an anomaly.9 The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars do leave traces in works of philosophy around 1800, but one must look to adjacent, paraphilosophical fields for a deeper engagement with the question of war and knowledge, first and foremost to military theory and literature. In the midst of the larger intellectual movement of German Idealism another strand of thought develops, a countercurrent that builds a new model of knowledge as a response to the experience of war. Abandoning the quest for universals, for certainty, and the transcendental mapping of the permanent fi xtures of the cognitive machinery within speculative

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introduction

philosophy, military minds turn their attention outward, to the temporary, the local, the unstable, the fluid—to the concreta of the empirical world in a state of war. Given the vast expansion of military operations around 1800, war had grown to such complexity that one military officer calls it l’empire du hazard, a hazardous empire or, simply, the empire of chance.10 On the battlefield epistemic conditions came to be regarded not only as inherently deficient; the fundamental state of knowledge was seen as contingent. In the eighteenth century military theory was guided by geometry, on mathematical calculations morphed into crystalline forms of star-shaped fortifications and a disciplined choreography of troops. Now, however, war emerges as a realm of radical contingency, a realm shot through with chance events, replete with errors and uncertainties. And yet, in between absolute certainty and pure randomness, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars make visible a middle realm of knowledge, a tremendously complex epistemic field of probabilities, possibilities, conjectures, averages, modalities. The wars function as a catalyst for a more worldly thought that looks squarely at this middle realm in order to understand it and to ground a new practical knowledge. For the problem of how to manage this complex field became a question of the utmost importance, a question that has persisted throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century and up until today. The present study does not pretend to comprehensiveness. I offer an outline of the state of war on the basis of an examination of key texts preceding, during, and after the wars. At the same time I situate these texts within the larger archive of symbolic practices around 1800. Comparing sources from primarily Prussia, France, England, and Russia, I thereby seek to uncover a larger development that manifests itself across various national and disciplinary boundaries. Together they suggest a shift within the discourse on war at the beginning of the nineteenth century—a transformation of the kind identified by Michel Foucault across the fields of political economy, natural history, and general grammar. In Foucault’s archaeological analysis, the “universal mathesis” that structured the order of things in Classical thought fractures on the threshold between the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century and gives way to the new paradigm of history as the fundamental mode of being of all things. For Foucault this shift marks nothing less than the demise of metaphysics and the birthplace of the empirical.11 But his methodological approach leaves little room for the causes of this major

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transformation. The “demiurge of knowledge” intentionally remains nameless.12 Within the more limited scope of my inquiry, however, the immediate event that provoked a shift in the military discourse can be assigned a clear name: the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Epistemology suffered a concussion at Austerlitz, at Wagram, at Borodino, and the effects of the impact can be measured in the texts that subsequently tried to make sense of the situation. Here one should not expect to find a clean line of division, though. Older models of knowledge reappear and jostle with the new one during the nineteenth century.13 Attempts to establish eternal rules of strategy and to treat warfare as a science still appear, but now they vie with the theories of empirico-practical knowledge that grew out of the wars. Moreover the discourse on the state of war explicitly formulates its military world picture as a paradigm in competition with the speculative philosophical discourse at the time. In the intellectual landscape around 1800, war emerges as a parallel world so out of joint that it cannot be grasped by a transcendental philosophy whose primary focus is the subject. The military theorists, literary authors, pedagogues, and inventors who try to comprehend the state of war therefore formulate their ideas both against the Classical thought of the eighteenth century and in competition with the reigning philosophical discourse around 1800. Another point on which my line of inquiry differs from that of traditional discourse analysis is my focus on what has been called the poetics of knowledge, that is, the ways the production of knowledge is bound up with aesthetic choices and techniques.14 In The Names of History, for example, Jacques Rancière shows how the change of narrative tense in historiography cannot be reduced to mere style, to a rhetorical turn of phrase. Rather the linguistic change has epistemological significance as it ushers in a “new regime of truth.”15 But clearly this is not restricted to historiography. In the words of Joseph Vogl, “Every epistemological clarification is linked to an aesthetic decision.”16 In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, the relation between the representational forms and their referents becomes a particularly critical issue, for the state of war could not be adequately described with the concepts, categories, and images inherited from the eighteenth century. While clearly marked as a historical event, war was nevertheless not a historical fact but an elusive phenomenon, a blurry object that required a new aesthetics, a new set of forms, new morphologies. The discourse on the state of war is thus inextricably linked to a reconfiguration of the poetics of war. Across traditional genre boundaries, in treatises, in novellas and novels but also on sketches, on maps, and in games,

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introduction

war is equally an epistemic problem and a problem of poetics. Having to reconstruct the state of war from scratch, authors, inventors, and theorists created symbolic worlds in which the particular figurations—be it the operational logic of war games, the topographical image of the military map, or the structure of a text—all reveal so many conceptions of war. The state of war therefore appears in a field that comprises both history and poetics. Even as war provides the impetus for the development of new media, as Friedrich Kittler stressed for decades,17 the state of war is as much a product of media as the media are a product of war. Generated by media poetics, the state of war is a second-order phenomenon that manifests itself in the concrete configurations of texts, maps, and games. If war is indeed “the father of all media,”18 media, in an admittedly odd genealogy, give birth to their father. One must therefore attend not just to historical circumstances but also to the idiosyncrasies of narrative, cartographic, and ludic grammars. They form the symbolic prisms that, each in their own way, manifest the state of war. As part of a historical epistemology that charts the transformations of poetics, literature therefore plays a somewhat unusual role. Placing novellas, dramas, and novels next to philosophy, military theory, and cartography, I not only examine these works as metareflections on the knowledge claims made in the adjacent fields; I also read literature as epistemology. I therefore focus on the operational logic that structures each fictional world and on the ways they challenge traditional conceptions of knowledge. In this approach literature is read as a way of dealing with the complex epistemic regime of war. By doing so I seek to redirect attention to the text itself as a medium. In its excitement over the development of new media, media studies has frequently made literature, broadly conceived, into its favored prügelknabe. The written text has often either been reduced to a symptom of its media-technological conditions, or it has been useful as an artifact that could demonstratively be tossed into history’s junkyard for obsolete media.19 As much as the operating systems and data processes of a diverse array of objects such as typewriters, computers, radios, rockets, and radars have been studied in detail, the internal mechanisms by which a literary work operates have been neglected in the analysis of war even within more traditional literary studies.20 This is particularly unfortunate because several literary works, faced with the problem of war, begin to reflect not just on other media, such as two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional models, but also on literature’s own conditions of possibility as a medium. Examining the state of war through poetics, I transpose the ques-

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tions of how data are processed, how systems operate, how simulations are constructed from the purely material level of signals and letters to the internal mechanisms of the text. These questions are central to the literary conception of war, and in this way media studies might also be made more productive for the field it has perhaps been overly anxious to leave behind: literature. The first chapter sets the stage for the later developments with an examination of the discourse on war in the eighteenth century. Here I consider the character and fate of the geometrical order. More specifically I trace the connections between geometry, fortification, and literature and show how the flat media inscriptions of the space of war in military treatises such as those of Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban are critically refracted in Tristram Shandy. In Sterne’s novel warped geometries, three-dimensional simulations, and excessive symbolic growth not only dismantle and drive ad absurdum the geometrical order of war; they also make visible the nexus of space, knowledge, and representation that structures the discourse on war. The chapter concludes with a preview of things to come by way of an analysis of a forged continuation of Tristram Shandy published in 1818. Based on the new order of war, the forgery brings out the profound transformation in the understanding of war that takes place around 1800. The second chapter develops the concept of the state of war. Against the background of the changed spatial order of the Napoleonic Wars, the grandes opérations, and in particular the appearance of the third dimension in the form of the terrain, I examine the disappearance of the geometrical order and the attempts to describe the paradigm that takes its place. In a variety of mostly Prussian writers of military, philosophical, and mathematical bent (Berenhorst, Clausewitz, Rühle von Lilienstern, Hegel, Laplace) I chart the emergence of the state of war conceived as a variegated epistemic field of chance, contingencies, and probabilities. The pressing question, however, was not merely what could be known but how to act efficiently in a destabilized world. Chapter 3 centers on the various attempts to fuse epistemology and praxis. Not merely descriptive, the knowledge of war is inherently operational, its ultimate goals lying outside of the mind. Alternative and superior methods of thinking that work under conditions of uncertainty become essential. In opposition to rational deliberation, thinkers cata logue fast and dirty forms of cognition that are more efficient in dealing with a multitude of contingent events. Know-how, judgment, habit,

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introduction

and tact are some of the concepts they develop to create a new model of knowledge in which knowing and acting coalesce. In Chapter 4 I examine different methods for training judgment. Obtained not on the school bench but amid the dangers on the field, experience becomes a central but problematic desideratum. Various technologies of experience are therefore developed as training devices that generate artificially, in virtual scenarios, the experience of the state of war. Primary among these technologies of experience is the textual medium. As an alternative to the direct exposure to contingency in actual combat, the somewhat safer method was suggested of immersing individuals in texts. Texts are crafted into simulations that seek not only to reproduce the operational logic of war but also to create a three-dimensional illusion of battle that implicates the reader. No longer observers, readers become situated participants, and experience is imparted directly into their bodies. Concurrently another medium for the management of war undergoes a tremendous development during the Napoleonic Wars: the topographical map. Given the importance of the terrain, maps come to constitute a media a priori for the planning and execution of large-scale military operations. Chapter 5 explores how the management of a military empire becomes dependent on its symbolic double, on the production and organization of an empire of paper. Here science, statecraft, bureaucracy, and military theory collude to form a cartographic apparatus that extends a mobile network across Europe—a network in which maps of various kinds circulate, from luxurious, hand-colored anniversary maps of conquest to hastily drawn sketches of the enemy’s position. The outline of the cartographic apparatus is complemented by an analysis of the multiform cartographic images of war on which one can detect the impact of the state of war, as well as the attempt to control the perception of war through techno-aesthetics. This kind of distance management forms the perspectival opposite to the textual simulations that locate the reader in the thick of things. The cartographic apparatus that emerges around 1800 thus installs a perspective at odds with the textual method of managing war. As a media event, the Napoleonic Wars give rise to conflicting technologies whose fraught relationship comes to inform the discussion of warfare throughout the century, for the development of the realist novel is bound up with a metadiscourse on the representability of the Napoleonic Wars. The final chapter examines the long-ranging media effects of the wars, where the map, as a medium within a medium, is

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transformed into a discursive object, and warfare into a struggle between maps and narratives. Faced with the representational problem of war, the novel is forced to reflect on its own conditions of possibility, and this reflection rehearses at the media level the opposition that emerged at the beginning of the century between the quest for certainty and universality independent of change and the more world-oriented empiricism of military thinkers. Epistemically marked, the map is the foil against which the novel develops its poetics and its own conception of the state of war. It is a distinctly modern outlook that issues from the Napoleonic Wars. In the twentieth century a number of thinkers return to the military discourse of 1800, adopt several concepts that were developed at that time, and deploy them as metaphors for an analysis of the societal order. Thus in the 1970s and 1980s the military world picture that grew out of the Napoleonic Wars comes to serve as a prism for the general state of affairs. In this, its latest permutation, the state of war is transformed from a state of exception into a cipher of modernity. In various ways the ideas that grew out of the Napoleonic Wars came to shape a view of modernity that still holds. In this book I seek to lay bare the origins of this outlook, to show how it emerged out of the poetics of war.

1

KL The Geometry of War Siege Architecture and Narrative Form

t begins with an accident in the archive. On a small table piled with heaps of papers and stacks of books is a comprehensive library of war: treatises on fortification by Cataneo and Ramelli are crowded by the works of Stevin and Coehoorn, Sheeter and Pagan, Blondel and Vauban. Additional volumes on the theory of ballistics by Tartaglia, Torricelli, and Galileo are scattered among them. Together they form a small but comprehensive library of military thought from its early Italian origins in the fifteenth century through its Dutch and French developments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—an archive of the science of war. But an inattentive movement makes the archive come tumbling down: a volume is knocked off the table; another follows. Eventually the entire archive is abandoned. The incident, which appears early in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy,1 is indicative of a larger shift within the intellectual history of war. Uncle Toby, obsessed with the science of fortification, has difficulties navigating the complex discourse on war, following the mathematics behind the trajectories of projectiles, and, in particular, making sense of the geometry and the variegated vocabulary of fortification. As if to mark the unwieldiness of the texts, the discourse itself has accrued such density that it has become unmanage-

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able in its pure materiality: the archive is knocked to the ground. The falling books, following no calculated trajectory but the random course of the accidental, present a vivid image of the interrogation of the discourse on war in the middle of the eighteenth century. Tumbling to the floor, an entire discourse falls victim to an accident, to the very element that the treatises on fortification have sought to exclude by the forms of geometry. The fictional scene thus sets the stage for an examination of the ways in which geometry, military theory, and the media of war in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century are entangled with questions of epistemology and representation. In this chapter I relate these different fields to one another in order to make clear how the science of fortification came to inform literature and shape the cultural imagination of war and to show how Sterne’s fiction serves as a gauge of a shift in the history of war media. It is thus a matter of delineating an intellectual history of war in the long eighteenth century within a composite and more complex field than any single discipline can encompass. Th is field comprises not only discursive forms but also various material forms. I will therefore discuss the treatises of Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban in addition to Tristram Shandy and a literary forgery of the novel, but I will also relate these texts to maps, games, and three-dimensional models. Tristram Shandy forms the focal point of the investigation, but before we return to Uncle Toby and the accident that sets everything in motion, let us take a closer look at the contents of the books he knocks to the ground.

Graphics When Vauban published Nouveau traité de géométrie et fortification (New Treatise on Geometry and Fortification) in 1695 it marked the apex of a development that had begun two hundred years earlier. With the importation of gunpowder into Europe, military architecture was restructured to counter the increased firepower of cannons. The high walls that had provided protection now became a liability as they would easily crumble under cannon fire. Verticality was therefore replaced by a horizontal design with protruding bastions.2 This directional shift paved the way for the construction of a carefully calculated geometrical space that was the product of the joint venture of science, architecture, and art. Albrecht Dürer’s treatise on fortification from 1527, Etliche vnderricht zu befestigung der Stett, Schloß vnd flecken (Several Instructions for Fortifying Towns, Cities, Castles, and Small Cities), opens with an indication of the new importance of architectural forms: “Since today in our time many

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unheard-of things happen, it seems to me imperative to consider how a fortification should be built in which kings, princes, lords and cities can defend themselves, not only such that a Christian will be protected from another Christian, but also such that the countries in the vicinity of the Turks will be secure from their violence and their projectiles. Therefore I have undertaken to show how such a structure is to be built.”3 The intrusion of the unheard and unexpected is met with a building that transforms brute acts of violence into a geometrical design. The development of new architectural forms domesticates and brings under control the contingencies of warfare. The tactical worth of a fort, as the Italian mathematician and engineer Niccolò Tartaglia writes, is thus determined not by its mass but “by the forms of its walls.”4 The perfection of forms constitutes the main objective of the subsequent treatises on fortification, and increasingly the geometrical basis comes to the fore. Vauban’s work from around 1700 presents the culmination of this development. His Nouveau traité de géométrie et fortification begins with an elaborate explanation of geometry. The circle, triangle, and square are defined along with various other figures. With this in place, the treatise proceeds with a series of exercises of increasing complexity in how to draw such geometrical figures: “Make a pyramid which has a parallelogram as a basis.”5 The second part of the treatise takes these shapes as the scientific basis for the architectural design, and gradually the fortification emerges out of these shapes. This is evident from the change in the book’s images. The bare geometrical shapes of part 1 slowly morph into the fort in the second part (Figures 1.1–1.3). What the reader witnesses in the argumentative and pictorial sequence is the slow but pure birth of fortification out of the shapes of geometry. As seen in Figure 1.2, the circle forms the geometrical basis within which all polygonal figures can be developed. In the treatise the science of war develops within this limited, circumscribed space, a space that in principle can be constructed just as well on a symbolic plane as on an actual terrain.6 Vauban’s definition of the science of fortification thus falls into three parts that are all graphical: l’ ignographie, which is the plan or representation of the length and breadth of a fort; l’orthographie, which is the profile or representation of a finished fort in three dimensions; and la scenographie, which is the fort seen in perspective.7 This graphic anchoring points to the central role played by the drawing of geometrical forms. A sheet of paper serves as the primary workspace of the engineer, and on this abstract plane the architectural designs can be worked into an image of order. Warfare is thus concerned with the production and management of symbolic forms. As Vauban writes, “Take two gauges and run

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figure 1.1 The geometric basis of Vauban’s fortifications. From Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, Nouveau traité de géométrie et fortification (Paris: Chez Sebastian Mabre Cramoisy, 1695), 7. Det Kongelige Bibliotek.

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figure 1.2 Gradually the fort emerges out of the abstract forms. From Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, Nouveau traité de géométrie et fortification (Paris: Chez Sebastian Mabre Cramoisy, 1695), 48. Det Kongelige Bibliotek.

figure 1.3 The characteristic star-shaped forts appear in the form of a pentagon and a hexagon. From Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, Nouveau traité de géométrie et fortification (Paris: Chez Sebastian Mabre Cramoisy, 1695), 89. Det Kongelige Bibliotek.

the geometry of wa r

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the parallels to the curtain wall, the sides, the face, the brisure & the tours creuses on the drawing, from the side toward the center of space, in order to find out how to run the parallel to the tour creuse; place these two gauges in front: & then open the compass until the point where you have drawn your tour creuse, & trace from the same point, with the two gauges, a curved line, until it reaches the base of the brisure & of the face.”8 In this way the contingencies of warfare are transformed into the security of a symmetrical drawing. When the singularities of a specific terrain do not allow for such symmetry, one has to construct an “irregular fortification.” Vauban is the first to consistently adapt his projects to the accidents of the terrain at the concrete site.9 Yet such irregular forms, though often necessary, are regarded as inferior, and the goal is as far as possible to reduce irregular figures to a “regular fortification.”10 This regularization involved rebuilding the topography of the site, leveling or raising parts of the ground to approximate the ideal forms determined by geometry.11 With Vauban, however, this way of thinking warfare comes to include not just the defensive fortifications but also the offensive works used in the attack of a fortress, that is, the entire field of war. As seen in Figure 1.4, Vauban develops a new method of laying siege, namely, a system of parallel trenches.12 Running toward the center of the fort and supported by a demicircle of batteries, the offensive measures are cast in a form that matches that of the fortification. The lines of sight and the lines of fire drawn in the image run in both directions and connect the inner defensive geometry with the outer offensive geometry. Time is thereby spatialized as also marked by the letter P, which indicates the location on the second line “where one could place the batteries, if it were necessary to change them.”13 Movement is only hypothetical and is inscribed visually in space by a dotted line. Thereby the attack of the fort is regarded as a shift from one graphical order to another, like the atemporal flip of a Kippfigur, or reversible figure. Time thus consists of a number of snapshots, a series of distinct stages, and action entails following a pregiven sequence. Vauban lists the various stages along with an estimate of the number of days required for each one. From beginning to end, he calculates, the conquest of a fortified town takes forty-eight days.14 In the image warfare is locked in a static order in which attack and defense are marked not by opposition but by complementarity. The actual tactical effects of this structure were described with some sarcasm by Daniel Defoe in An Essay upon Projects from 1697:

Vauban invented a new method of laying siege: the system of parallel trenches. From Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, De l’attaque et de la defense des places (La Haye: Chez Pierre de Hondt, 1737), 1: 29, plate 5. Det Kongelige Bibliotek.

figure 1.4

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Now ’tis frequent to have Armies of Fifty thousand men of a side stand at Bay within view of one another, and spend a whole Campaign in Dodging, or as ’tis genteely call’d, Observing one another, and then march off into Winter-Quarters. The difference is in the Maxims of War, which now differ as much from what they were formerly, as Long Perukes do from Piqued Beards; or as the Habits of the People do now, from what they then wore. The present Maxims of the War are; Never Fight without a manifest Advantage. And always Encamp so as not to be forc’ d to it. And if two opposite Generals nicely observe both these Rules, it is impossible they shou’d ever come to fight.15

In Vauban this balance is captured by the images that produce a graphic world in which the extreme violence of war has been transformed into the harmonic world of circles, angles, and parabolas. In the many images of the treatise that together constitute this graphic world, the firepower of the artillery and the mines only once manages to destroy the crystalline order of forms that hold each other in check. Figure 1.5 shows the moments before, during, and after the explosion of a mine. This moment of disorder is the exception to the pervasive control imposed by geometry, and while the walls have been reduced to rubble, their original shape has been retained in the sketch as a ghost image of the underlying order.

L’esprit géométrique Polygonal diagrams lie at the heart of military discourse around 1700. But they also issue from the larger intellectual climate of the time. As Henry Guerlac has pointed out, the cult of reason and order in military thought may well be seen as the expression of a Cartesian epistemology, of what Blaise Pascal labeled the “geometrical spirit.”16 In his brief text from 1655, De l’esprit géométrique, Pascal outlines the basic principles of a method of reasoning that is capable of producing certainty, and these principles he finds in geometry: “I have chosen this science [geometry], because it is the only one that knows the true rules of reasoning.”17 Proceeding from clear definitions and using the rules of geometry, one can build an unconquerable epistemic fortress, a well-protected certainty immune to the incursions of error and chance. Only a few years earlier Hobbes had looked for a secure method for the establishment of commonwealths, and he found it in the rules of arithmetic and geometry, which,

The one moment of disorder in Vauban’s treatise, when the geometrical order is disrupted. From Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, De l’attaque et de la defense des places (La Haye: Chez Pierre de Hondt, 1737), 1: 113, plate 16. Det Kongelige Bibliotek.

figure 1.5

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he claims, “is the Mother of all Naturall Science.”18 Subservient to “nothing but rigide Truth,”19 geometry, however, is conceived not just as the mother of knowledge but also as the mother of war, for the works of fortification are the direct issue of this science and are often confused with it. Examining the notion of power, Hobbes writes, “Arts of publique use, as Fortification, making of Engines, and other Instruments of War; because they conferre to Defence, and Victory, are Power: And though the true Mother of them, be Science, namely the Mathematiques; yet, because they are brought into the Light, by the hand of the Artificer, they be esteemed (the Midwife passing with the vulgar for the Mother,) as his issue.”20 In the structures of fortification, the military engineers bring into the world and embody ideal forms of knowledge. Conversely, looking at a regular fortification one sees an image of the certainty that Hobbes is at pains to establish through the geometrical method. The implied but openly visible epistemology of fortification has a further theological anchoring. Ephraim Chambers notes in his Cyclopædia from 1728, “Some Authors go back to the Beginning of the World, for the Author and Origin of Military Architecture. According to them, GOD himself was the first Engeneer [sic]; and Paradise, or the Garden of Eden, the first Forteresse.”21 In this genealogy the engineer is performing the task of a demiurge who, with the forms of geometry, creates a world of perfection complete onto itself. In an imitation of the initial creation, the engineers made order out of the chaos of war with the Elements of Euclid.22 Against this background one might read the treatises of Vauban as epistemic documents in which the visual images function as the at once implicit and explicit projection of a graphic epistemology. In this discourse the state of war appears as the calculable product of a series of graphic operations, as the function of a fundamentally knowable and immutable geometrical order. Obviously, unpredictable events and chance occurrences would arise immediately in an actual siege, but they would appear as deviations from the theoretical foundation, not as an integral part of it. The graphic image had come to constitute the primary workspace of the engineers, and in this world of symbols errors are errors of inscription and of calculation. As the authors of symbolic worlds, the engineers had full responsibility but also complete authority and control over their creations. With the spatialization of time, the condition of possibility for chance occurrences is eliminated, and instead time is replaced by the atemporal switch from one immutable order to the next. On paper the state of war coincides with the two-dimensional order of geometry.

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More than anything, it is this epistemic claim that the images in Vauban’s treatises put on display.

Language, Maps, Models When Uncle Toby knocks over the discourse on fortification, the accident is therefore not an accidental occurrence within the realm of the novel. Written between 1759 and 1767 Tristram Shandy operates with a double time scheme. When the first volume appeared in 1759, the English reading public found a fictional character poring over the treatises of Vauban around 1700. With Vauban’s death in 1707, however, the importance of siege warfare gradually began to decline. So when the discourse on fortification becomes the object of literary scrutiny around midcentury, it appears in the text as an objet trouvé, a curious and fascinating relic of an increasingly obsolete conception of war. From this distance, a distance that is compounded by the satirical stance of the novel, Tristram Shandy offers a careful, if irreverent, examination of the discourse on war—one that proceeds from an analysis of its media. Uncharacteristically the media investigation develops methodically. It begins with one medium and then moves to the next, from language to maps to models. The event that sets the critique in motion is Uncle Toby’s narrative of the events of the Siege of Namur in 1695, in which he participated and has since been partially incapacitated due to a wound in the groin. Attempting to describe the battle to his listeners in clear terms, he is thwarted by the language of fortification: “What rendered the account of this affair the more intricate to my uncle Toby, was this,—that in the attack of the counterscarp before the gate of St. Nicolas, extending itself from the bank of the Maes, quite up to the great water-stop;—the ground was cut and cross-cut with such a multitude of dykes, drains, rivulets, and sluices, on all sides,—and he would get so sadly bewilder’d and set fast amongst them, that frequently he could neither get backwards or forwards to save his life; and was oft times obliged to give up the attack upon that very account only.”23 Toby’s confusion stems not from the fact that the attacking armies have been cut off from seeing each other’s operations but from the fact that the siege works are transformed into a linguistic obstacle course. Scarp and counterscarp, ravelin and glacis become the elements of a verbal battle. Sterne superimposes the actual on the symbolic to the effect that Toby is literally stuck in language. The transparency of the linguistic medium is given a material form that renders it opaque. In order to overcome the difficulties of describing space with language, Toby proceeds to another

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medium: “If he could purchase such a thing, and have it pasted down upon a board, as a large map of the fortifications of the town and citadel of Namur, with its environs, it might be a means of giving him ease [ . . . ]—so that he was pretty confident he could stick a pin upon the identical spot of ground where he was standing in when the stone struck him.”24 In addition to Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopædia, one of Sterne’s main sources on the Wars of the Spanish Succession is Nicolas Tindal’s The History of England, from which he borrows several passages verbatim.25 Accompanying the text are a number of maps, among them a map of the fortifications of Namur (Figure 1.6). In spite of the highly irregular fortification, Toby manages to relate the events clearly after a few weeks’ intensive study of the map. Time and space are thus played out against each other: the sequential temporality of language against the static order of the map. Only with the aid of the map, in which the representation has a material and visual foundation, does Toby master his subject. Tristram Shandy therefore appears to adopt the two-dimensional topographical basis inherent in the science of fortification: the map serves as a grounding for the architecture of war and also for the discourse on its history. Yet his success with the map instills a “desire of knowledge” in him and spurs him on to go deeper into the scientific study of siege warfare. Here the map does not stand as the final grounding of knowledge; as the “sweet fountain of science” it functions instead as a catalyst for further inquiry.26 Toby procures maps of virtually every fortified town in Italy and Flanders, and it is at this point that he collects his library of war: treatises on fortification by all the major engineers from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, including those of Vauban, together “with almost as many more books of military architecture, as Don Quixote was found to have of chivalry, when the curate and barber invaded his library.”27 Instead of clarifying the geometry of fortification, however, the treatises only bring confusion, such that Toby’s attempts to follow the rules of pyroballogy result in his mistaking a parabola for a hyperbola, and so on.28 In other words, the graphic construction and management of space turns out not to solve the difficulties of the sequential medium. Instead of serving as the ground of truth, geometrical maps become a source of error and confusion to such a degree that the narrative breaks down.29 Tristram intervenes: “—————stop! my dear uncle Toby,——stop!—go not one foot further into this thorny and bewilder’d track,——intricate are the steps! intricate are the mases [sic] of this labyrinth! intricate are the troubles which the pursuit of this bewitching phantom, Knowledge, will bring upon thee.”30

The City of Namur with the Castle and Other Fortifications, ca. 1745. Isaac Basire’s map, which accompanies Nicolas Tindal’s The History of England, by Mr. Rapin de Thoyras, 4 vols. (London, 1732–45). Author’s collection.

figure 1.6

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In Sterne’s satire the symmetrical figures of siege geometry are distorted into a labyrinth of knowledge. It thereby dismantles the graphic epistemology inherent in the discourse on fortification. Visual order provides no epistemic grounding; it functions instead as an array of obstacles behind which knowledge disappears. Again the efficacy of the medium is undermined by its own materiality. As Toby was lost in language, he is now lost in the materiality of a warped geometry. Continuing its examination of the media space of war, however, the novel adds another dimension as it substitutes the two-dimensional map with a full-blown three-dimensional model. Toby’s right-hand man, Corporal Trim, suggests that instead of working with the graphic inscription on paper, they should go out into the country and build a fort in miniature using the ichnography of the map. For this purpose they settle on the bowling green next to the kitchen garden by Uncle Toby’s country house: “His way, which was the simplest one in the world, was this; as soon as ever a town was invested— (but sooner when the design was known) to take a plan of it, (let it be what town it would) and enlarge it upon a scale to the exact size of his bowling-green; upon the surface of which, by means of a large role of packthread, and a number of small piquets driven into the ground, at the several angles and redans, he transferred the lines from his paper; then taking the profile of the place, with its works, to determine the depths and slopes of the ditches,—the talus of the glacis, and the precise height of the several banquets, parapets, &c.—he set the corporal to work——and sweetly went it on.”31 The method of superimposing the geometrical schema onto the actual ground where a fort was to be built was part of the standard procedure of fortification as the intermediate step that effected the transition from the symbolic plan to its realization.32 Here, however, the final result of their efforts is a peculiar hybrid that fuses the symbolic with the real and conflates the model with its reference. Building scale models of sieges was not Sterne’s invention. In 1668 Louis XIV’s minister of war, Louvois, ordered Vauban to construct a so-called planrelief, and he thereby founded a collection that, with later additions, comprised about 260 models.33 These plans-reliefs are three-dimensional miniature models of various forts, made of wood, papier mâché, pulverized sand, and colored silk (see Figure 1.7). Almost all of them have been built to a scale of 1/600. Their purpose was instructional as well as tactical: they served as a preparation for the operations of a siege, although by the time Sterne was writing they had gradually lost this function and had become objects of art to be displayed

A three-dimensional model of a fort, plan-relief, built at a scale of 1/600. Musée de l’armée, Paris. Photo by the author.

figure 1.7

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to foreign dignitaries. Between 1747 and 1750, for example, the engineer Larcher d’Aubencourt constructed a model measuring 7.76 by 6.50 meters of the fortifications of Namur as they appeared in the 1690s, when they were built by Vauban and Menno van Coehoorn.34 In this model as well, the separation of the space of the viewer from the space of the object is part of the raison d’être of the model: by scaling an object down to a representation, an outside space emerges, and only from this position outside the representation can an overview be gained of the actual fort. The separation of actual space and represented space is the precondition for the efficacy of the model. On the bowling green, however, Toby becomes part of the model.35 So as not to get lost in the three-dimensional representation as well, he must therefore build the separation into the model in the form of a sentry box and an esplanade. He thereby inverts the rationale of symbolic management. The advantage of maps and plans-reliefs lies in the improved efficacy in an economy of effort: minimal symbolic exertions have great real-world effects. Toby, however, builds a representational hybrid in which the relation between the real and the symbolic has been inverted. His model-cum-fort lacks real-world effects. Instead the model encroaches upon the real and transforms it into symbols, as when they prepare the offensive and lay down the siege lines: “My uncle Toby took the liberty of incroaching upon his kitchen garden, for the sake of enlarging his works on the bowling green, and for that reason generally ran his first and second parallels betwixt two rows of his cabbages and his collyflowers.”36 The model either subsumes the real under its symbolic representation, or it directly transforms the real into a representation, as when Trim turns a pair of jackboots into a couple of mortars. Something between an actual fort and a miniature, the bowling green is a hybrid in which symbolic inscription is pushed beyond its symbolic limit and into the real, while, conversely, the real is annexed by the model. In Sterne’s media satire, the symbolic, in the progression from language to maps to models, becomes increasingly material and finally makes it halfway into the world of actuality, whereby it loses the epistemic virtues that provided the rationale for the symbolic inscription to begin with. The primacy of Vauban’s graphics is thus driven ad absurdum in an excessive symbolic growth. The inversion of the economy of effort entails a reversal of direction in the exchange between the symbolic and the real. Toby procured the map of Namur as an explanatory aid, but with the construction of the hybrid, he and Trim intend to model the various sieges taking place on the Continent at the time:

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“We might begin the campaign, continued Trim, on the very day that his Majesty and the Allies take the field, and demolish ’em town by town as fast as—.”37 Relying on newspaper reports for information, they turn the hybrid into a simulation of actual warfare that takes place almost in real time: “They went on, during the whole siege, step by step with the allies.” They further add to the fortifications “a little model town” in which each house is independent so they can reorganize it into any structure necessary: “The town was a perfect Proteus—It was Landen, and Trerebach, and Santvliet, and Drusen, and Hagenau,—and then it was Ostend and Menin, and Aeth and Dendermond.”38 As a simulating device the model is highly sophisticated. Once assembled, Vauban’s plans-reliefs have no independent and mobile parts. On the small space of the bowling green, however, Toby and Trim can simulate every siege in Europe. Yet the apparent economy of their device is undermined by its relation to actual warfare and the reversal of cause and effect. Toby and Trim operate post hoc in a historical mode, not propter hoc in a tactical mode. No longer a tool for the planning and management of warfare, the simulation is directly dependent on the wars themselves, and every move in the simulation is determined by the engagements in the actual siege. Instead of producing real effects, the simulation becomes an effect of the real. It is therefore in complete accordance with this inverted logic of symbolic management that the conclusion of the Wars of the Spanish Succession with the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 brings Toby’s simulated warfare to an end. When Sterne brings the discourse of fortification into his novel, the purpose is evidently a satirical one, but the literary refraction of this discourse should be taken seriously as a critical reflection on the discourse on war.39 With the elimination of the standard rationale of symbolic management, the tactical purposelessness of the situation puts on display the medium itself. Toby’s efforts can be regarded as an extreme version of psychologist Kurt Lewin’s claim that if you truly want to understand something, you should try to change it. Stripping it of all real effects, Sterne drives the primacy of the medium ad absurdum and shows war as a pure media construct, a parallel world enclosed unto itself. Toby’s model becomes emblematic of the problem that haunts all attempts to represent warfare, namely that in speaking, in writing, in playing, the complex object itself is absent. The state of war must be built. Its elements and the operational logic that ties the elements together

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must be produced from scratch and modeled, whether this modeling takes place with the aid of paper, lumber, maps, jackboots, or texts. In each case war therefore appears as a second-order phenomenon, as the concrete constellation and interaction of material or discursive forms. Yet at the same time it is through such a model that Toby seeks to reconstruct actual experience. Not only must the state of war be generated artificially; it must be generated in such a way that it can be imparted to an individual. Walking around inside the model, Toby is an emblem of later high-tech attempts to create the experience of the state of war artificially through immersion in a simulation, be it a computer game or a flight simulator. In this case we, the readers, remain safely at a satirical distance outside the model, but Toby is increasingly locked inside it. Trading an actual marriage for a simulated war, Toby becomes a permanent fi xture of the model. In the inversion of the real and the invented, Sterne’s fiction displays the power of simulations to create a complete ersatz, a full-scale parallel world whose reality effects can compete with and even trump the real. Toby’s obsession with his model is not without a certain ambiguity, for, as several scholars have pointed out, it leads to a desire for renewed warfare. Whether this is meant as an ironic critique of British participation in the Seven Years’ War or as propaganda for it, I shall leave aside.40 At a more general level, however, it testifies to the ambiguously hypnotic power of media of war. There is a certain strain within media studies that seems, like Toby, to be so enamored of military media that it forgets their ultimate purpose as engines of war.41 While the purpose of several war simulations is to bring the individual into the midst of the invented world, for the study of the state of war one will do well to keep the ambiguity of Toby’s obsession in mind and to remain at some distance instead of walking around inside them hypnotized.

Circles and Lines: The Narrative Architecture of Tristram Shandy If Tristram Shandy sheds light on the construction of war within the discourse on fortification, it also enlists this discourse in a larger effort to reconfigure the traditional plot structure of the novel. Contrary to a conventional schema that proceeds sequentially from kernel to kernel by some degree of narrative necessity, Tristram Shandy develops a poetics of contingency that makes chance its organizational principle.42 Turning a basic tenet of Aristotle’s Poetics on its head, Tristram’s father, Walter Shandy, states, “La Vraisemblance [ . . . ] n’est

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pas toujours du Côté de la Vérité,”43 thus providing a gloss on and a justification for the series of improbable freak accidents that determine the movement of the text.44 In a sense the novel forms the exterior to the science of fortification, for where the military discourse sought to exclude chance, Tristram Shandy turns it into a productive principle, as inscribed in the fortuitous name that provides the title of the novel. This is evident not only at the level of the story but also at the metalevel, where the novel reflects on its own poetics. The self-reflection proceeds from a series of geometrical figures. The first one is the most perfect figure of Euclidian geometry: the circle. Recounting the circumstances surrounding his own birth, Tristram introduces the midwife, whose fame extends to the “very out-edge and circumference of that circle of importance, of which kind every soul living, whether he has a shirt to his back or no.——has one surrounding him.” In the present case the space thus outlined “should be understood to mean no more of it, than a small circle described upon the circle of the great world, of four English miles diameter, or thereabouts.”45 Centered in the village in which Tristram is born and comprehending the whole parish, the circle circumscribes the outer edge of the world of the novel. As the engineer in the science of fortification proceeded from the circle, which embraces all regular polygons, so Sterne, in the construction of his text, traces the birth of Tristram and the origin of the novel back to this foundational figure. The link between the science of fortification and the poetics of the novel is further marked by the narrator’s promise to include a map of the circle of events, a map that has already been drawn but is still in the hands of the engraver. This map, on which “all this will be more exactly delineated and explain’d,” is to serve as a “key” to the novel; any difficulties of comprehension due to dark or unclear textual passages can be resolved by recourse to the map.46 Sterne thus seemingly adopts not only the mathematical foundation of the science of fortification but also the primacy of the graphic inscription. Like the fort itself, the novel grows out of the geometrical map. And yet within the perfect circle, the novel draws a highly irregular narrative geometry. Immediately after circumscribing the space of events, the narrator proceeds to the problem of the line: “Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on his mule,—straight forward;——for instance, from Rome all the way to Loretto, without ever once turning his head aside either to the right hand or to the left,—he might venture to foretell you to an hour when he should get to his journey’s end;——but the thing is, mor-

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figure 1.8 Sterne’s map of the irregular zigzagging movements of the narrative in the first four volumes. From Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Leipzig: Bernh. Tauchnitz June, 1849), 368. Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek.

ally speaking, impossible: For, if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid.”47 In this passage and throughout the novel, the graphical space of the text is peppered with hyphens and dashes—straight lines—but they do not connect to form a linear development. Rather they are repeatedly broken off as the text turns now to the right, now to the left. In a metacommentary on the novel itself, Sterne outlines the shape of the narrative architecture that is about to be built. The straight line is here replaced by a series of desultory and digressive lines (Figure 1.8). When the map of the circle of the fictional boundaries eventually appears,48 it is inserted directly into the text toward the end of the sixth volume.

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As the two inscriptions at the bottom of Figure 1.8 indicate, Tristram has both designed and carved this map, which omits all topographical information and depicts instead the peculiar winding path of the narrative in the first four volumes. Within the circle emerges not the regular geometry of fortification but instead a series of zigzagging figures, the warped geometry of the narrative moving in random saccadic jerks.49 As an itinerary map, it narrativizes geometry and twists the discourse on fortification out of shape in a détournement of the figures on which it is grounded. The space within the circle here becomes the site for the incalculable, contingent movement of a narrative that cannot be contained, for another figure, this one of the fifth chapter, appears on the subsequent page, literally off the map.50 As Toby inverts the raison d’être of the plan-relief, Sterne thus inverts the epistemology of the science of fortification, fashioning chaos out of order using the selfsame book, Elements by Euclid, that the writers on fortification used, but to contrary effect. In a sermon entitled “Time and Chance,” Sterne writes, “Time and chance,—apt seasons and fit conjunctures have the greatest sway, in the turns and disposals of men’s fortunes.”51 The two elements that the graphic world of Vauban’s treatises excluded in the timeless progression from one spatial order to the next are here adopted as the engine of narrative development. Appropriating the imagery of the science of fortification, Tristram Shandy reinjects time and chance into its static graphics and transforms the esprit géométrique into a celebration of the productive potential of contingency.52 The discourse on war thus comes to shape the poetics of the novel at the level of content and at the metalevel. In its parodic exploration of the science of fortification, Tristram Shandy is shaped into its negative image.

Toward Topography During the course of the eighteenth century a gradual shift in the praxis of war took place. After about two centuries of continuous development, siege warfare entered a period of slow decline as new developments in the art of war relegated it to a secondary role.53 As the offensive firepower grew, the “interminable succession of sieges” gradually gave way to open battle between two or more mobile armies.54 Since armies at this time were still professional, however, the great financial losses one could expect to incur in a battle made the wars of the eighteenth century tactical games of maneuvering.55 In 1757, only two years before Sterne published the first volume of the novel, Frederick II of Prussia had with great skill out-maneuvered the Austrian enemy at the Battle of Leuthen during the Seven Years’ War. As Sterne was writing, the

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bounded, static art of war was giving way to a more mobile one. When, therefore, Toby is compared to Don Quixote, the tertium comparationis between the science of fortification and Cervantes is more than the disjunction between the symbolic and the real caused by an excessive reading of books. At a deeper level it is the disjunction between two orders of knowledge. Foucault, in The Order of Things, reads Don Quixote as an epistemic dinosaur, as the belated embodiment of an order of knowledge whose grounding lies in a system of resemblance that has been replaced by a system of representation.56 Roaming La Mancha, Don Quixote operates with a theory of knowledge that no longer applies. In similar fashion, a hundred years later on the bowling green, Toby is playing out a military discourse that is growing obsolete. The closed static spatial organization of siege warfare was being supplanted by an unbounded open spatial organization in which the traversal of space, not its geometrical ordering, was the key element. This shift was evident in midcentury, when Sterne’s novel was being published, but an early indication of it is visible already at the beginning of the century, the setting of the novel. In the Wars of the Spanish Succession (1701–1713), the Duke of Marlborough employed a strategy of maneuvering that prefigured that of Frederick II and, later, the vast expansion of military space by Napoleon. At one point Trim mistakes geography for chronology, and Toby proceeds to clarify: What business, added the corporal triumphantly, has a soldier, an’ please your honour, to know any thing at all of geography? ——Thou would’st have said chronology, Trim, said my uncle Toby; for as for geography, ’tis of absolute use to him; he must be acquainted intimately with every country and its boundaries where his profession carries him; he should know every town and city, and village and hamlet, with the canals, the roads, and hollow ways which lead up to them; there is not a river or a rivulet he passes, Trim, but he should be able at first sight to tell thee what is its name—in what mountains it takes its rise—what is its course—how far it is navigable—where fordable—where not; he should know the fertility of every valley, as well as the hind who ploughs it; and be able to describe, or, if it is required, to give thee an exact map of all the plains and defiles, the forts, the acclivities, the woods and morasses, thro’ and by which his army is to march; he should know their produce, their plants, their minerals, their waters, their animals, their seasons, their climates, their heats and cold, their inhabitants, their customs, their language, their policy, and even their religion.

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the geometry of wa r Is it else to be conceived, corporal, continued my uncle Toby rising up in his sentry-box, as he began to warm in this part of his discourse—how Marlborough could have marched his army from the banks of the Maes to Belburg; from Belburg to Kerpenord—(here the corporal could sit no longer) from Kerpenord, Trim, to Kalsaken; from Kalsaken to Newdorf; from Newdorf to Landenbourg; from Landenbourg to Mildenheim; from Mildenheim to Elchingen; from Elchingen to Gingen; from Gingen to Balmerchoffen; from Balmerchoffen to Skellenburg, where he broke in upon the enemy’s works; forced his passage over the Danube; cross’d the Lech—pushed on his troops into the heart of the empire, marching at the head of them through Friburg, Hokenwert, and Schonevelt, to the plains of Blenheim and Hochstet?——Great as he was, corporal, he could not have advanced a step, or made one single day’s march without the aids of Geography.57

With the focus on mobile warfare rather than siege warfare, Toby’s description of Marlborough’s movements displays the beginnings of a shift from a geometrically ordered space to a space that is conceived geographically and topographically. Instead of the knowledge of pure geometry required by the science of fortification, knowledge of the terrain became essential to the conduct of war. As Toby points out, this change also implicates the media of spatial inscription. The map is transformed from a clean sheet on which geometrical forms could be drawn into a topographical design. The background of the siege map, which in Vauban’s treatises serves mainly as a flat surface that makes inscriptions possible, becomes on the topographical map the essential element. Not until Napoleon’s grandes opérations would this development of strategy and media reach a complete breakthrough, but already here space was becoming vectorial, made up of obstacles and networks of passageways. Where, in Foucault’s analysis, the shift from one order of knowledge is conceived as a radical break, thus making Don Quixote’s battle with the windmills incomprehensible to all but himself, the change in spatial order is more gradual. Neither the Duke of Marlborough nor Frederick II nor Napoleon was a stranger to sieges,58 but their efficiency waned as the firepower of the artillery increased.59 The shift was gradual, and the two spatial orders would exist side by side, but, as Clausewitz would later write, “the geometrical principle” was no longer decisive.60 Of the two, mobile warfare and its topographical inscription were in the ascendency. The Quixotic element in Toby’s military efforts therefore consists not only in the disjuncture between the symbolic and the real but also in

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the fact that he is operating with a spatial order that was losing its hold by the time Sterne was writing. The geometrical principle, which at once organizes his novel and is critically refracted by it, would eventually recede into the background and give way to topography. The topographical order also manifests itself across the fields of literature, military theory, and the media of war, and, curiously, it can again be gleaned from Tristram Shandy, for in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars a forged continuation of the novel was published in France.

Bernard de Montbrison: Author of Tristram Shandy In 1818 a rather peculiar document appeared in Paris: Jeu de la guerre de terre et de mer, et les derniers chapitres de Tristram Shandy, trouvés dans les papiers d’Yorick avec figures (War Game on Land and at Sea, and the Last Chapters of Tristram Shandy, Found among Yorick’s Papers with Illustrations). Among the numerous continuations, imitations, and forgeries that had flooded the book market on the publication of the first volume of Tristram Shandy,61 this belated work stands out. The alleged editor and, we must assume, actual author, is a man by the name of Louis-Simon-Joseph Bernard de Montbrison. A year his senior, Montbrison attended the Ecole militaire de Paris with the young Napoleon in 1782,62 and he later served as the first rector of the Académie de Strasbourg from 1810 to 1818. Ostensibly the editor of a manuscript from the 1760s, Montbrison presents a work that straddles two eras in the history of war. As a revision of Sterne’s text from the perspective of the Napoleonic Wars, the Jeu de la guerre performs a kind of deviating repetition not unlike the one described by Borges in “Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote,” in which the rewriting of Cervantes centuries later is deemed to be infinitely richer than the original because the changed historical context adds to the text multiple layers of significance. While Montbrison does not perform a literal transcription of Tristram Shandy but an updated continuation, the text is at once the same and entirely different. In the integration of the identical and the foreign, in the merging of the discourse on war from the eighteenth century with that of the early nineteenth century, the text brings out the profound changes in the conception of war that appears around 1800. Jeu de la guerre thus anticipates in condensed form what is to be developed in greater detail in the chapters to come. Let us take a closer look at this complex document. As the title indicates, the manuscript consists of a war game and Montbrison’s translation of the last few chapters of Tristram Shandy found among the

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papers of Yorick that have made it to Paris through a series of highly improbable events. Complementing these fragments are a collection of four maps in color and an excerpt of a treatise or “dissertation” by Tristram’s father. All the fragments are occupied with a “military subject,” namely the invention of the topographical war game.63 As Montbrison points out in the introduction and in various footnotes to the actual manuscript, the inventor of this game is none other than Uncle Toby: “It is unquestionable, according to this authentic manuscript, that the invention of the war game on the model of chess belongs entirely to uncle Toby.”64 The invention of this game is described in the last chapters, for the adventure on the bowling green is cut short by a disastrous winter: “An exorbitant snowfall, followed by a rapid thaw destroyed the lawn, filled up the ditches, and it became impossible for the captain to find the least trace of the beloved and fateful St. Nicolas bastion, nor of any of the other bastions.”65 Further afflicted by a bout of sciatica that turns into a permanent state of pain, Toby has to abandon the sieges entirely, but this provides the impetus for the invention of the war game. At first he seizes a chessboard, but when he sees the isomorphous order of the two-dimensional grid, he notices the discrepancy between the ludic space and the one he recalls from his own campaigns. The game of chess would become a far better simulation if it included mountains, hills, rivers, and oceans, so Toby instantly “invent[s] a chess game that can be applied to all the operations of military art.”66 In a parody of Genesis, Toby proceeds to create the world of the game in seven days, including oceans, pontoons to cross the rivers, army corps, and munitions. The result is “an exact map of the theater of war. A large river, which traversed it, several flowing streams, forests, green hills transformed it into the very image of a romantic landscape. But all this natural beauty was destined to become inundated with blood.”67 In the first game played on this topographical map, Toby and Trim simulate a siege and thus remain beholden to the nature of war in the eighteenth century. But Walter Shandy is quick to realize the revolution in military thought wrought by Toby’s invention. In a treatise on the war game entitled “On the Spirit of War and of Captain Toby’s Game” he gives a brief overview of the history of chess and continues, “Finally my brother Toby appeared; and as the first person in Europe he substituted the level and uniform terrain of the older chessboard with a terrain of endlessly varied forms.” In other words, “my brother Toby applied the operations of chess to the battlefield, which presents all the varieties of the terrain.”68 The science of fortification and its geometrical order have given way to a topographical

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order of space based on the terrain. Now the natural accidents and obstacles enter into the immediate considerations of the theory of war, and this entails a vast expansion of space. As the editor notes, Toby’s map presents an exact image of modern war, in which it is the advantage of the army’s positions and the “superiority of maneuvers” that determine the outcome.69 Not restricted to the site of a fortification, Toby’s map allows for a simulation of the grand operations instituted by Napoleon, in which the army was split up into corps that maneuvered concurrently across the terrain in an extended space. Montbrison relies on a book of military theory published in 1815 by the French general Joseph, vicomte de Rogniat, Considérations sur l’art de la guerre (Reflections on the Art of War). In chapter 8, on positions and encampments, he states, “The terrain is the chessboard on which the generals play the game of war with the troops they command. Until now we have assumed that this chessboard was uniform and without obstacles such that when looking at a simple and coherent basis we could all the more easily establish the rules and principles of the order, the arrangement, the support and the successive march of the cohorts, the squadrons and the batteries, which one can regard as the different pieces of the game. But when the terrain changes it is certain that the order of battle will lose its regularity and will adapt to the unevenness and the variations of the locality. The order and the march and the value of the pieces are modified with the increase of information, and the game becomes more complicated.”70 Rogniat delineates the new spatial order that came to dominate after 1800—an order that Montbrison projects back into the eighteenth century or, more precisely, back into the discourse on war around 1700 through Sterne’s text from the 1760s. If Sterne’s Toby is quixotic in his obsession with a theory of war that was growing obsolete, Montbrison’s Toby is the lone genius who invents a conception of war that will appear fully developed only a century later. It is therefore hardly surprising that Walter should compare the invention to the discovery of America. As Rogniat hints, however, the change in the conception of space is inseparable from an epistemic transformation. The more complicated game of topographical chess cannot be calculated in the same way as the science of fortification. When Walter Shandy, with his usual philosophical verve, claims that every error made in the game is by necessity a breach of an eternal principle in military theory, and, reciprocally, that every error in war transposed algebraically onto one of the boards will amount to an error in the game, Montbrison interpolates, “We are afraid that this entire chapter by M. Walter Shandy

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is pervaded by an excessive science.”71 Not beholden to the rules of geometry, following no predetermined sequence of action, no linear progression, the games that can be played on the topographical map are “absolutely different.”72 Montbrison’s nineteenth-century text thus suggests a different epistemic order, one that cannot be explained more geometrico. It further suggests that the game can be used as an educational tool to train soldiers to manage the increased complexity of war, for as Walter Shandy states, there are two ways of learning the art of war; the first is simply to go and fight, but the second is to play Uncle Toby on his topographical chessboard.73 Warfare is given a technical correlate in the topographical board, which in turn generates immediate experience virtually. The game thereby becomes a simulation designed to involve the participants in the virtual world of war. In his forged genealogy of the war game, Montbrison sketches out the rudiments of a new paradigm of war. If Toby on the bowling green is not the last man standing within the conception of war governed by geometry, but instead the prescient inventor of a new order one hundred years avant la lettre, what, more precisely, does it look like? What spatial order obtains, what epistemology? What is it that has come to replace the esprit géométrique? Further, how are literary texts, philosophical treatises, topographical maps, and games all designed to create a virtual experience of the state of war? And, finally, how do these different fields relate to one another? Montbrison’s remarkable document outlines a field in which literature, military theory, topographical maps, and games are all intertwined. But how, exactly?

2

KL State of War 1800 Topography and Chance

n 1812 the Russian emperor summoned Carl von Clausewitz to a war council. A report about unforeseen enemy movements had just come in, and its effect on their military plans needed to be gauged. The three members of the council gathered around a map lying on the table and began discussing the different scenarios:

I

Colonel Toll, Count Orlof and the author gathered around the table to investigate the matter on the map. Count Orlof, being a young officer who had never been involved in the larger movements of war but otherwise possessed a lively mind, quickly came up with the most extravagant suggestions, which the rest of us did not regard as practically feasible. Colonel Toll suggested a change in the movements for the next day which in itself would have been apt but could easily lead to confusion because there was no time to organize it properly. The author did not think the situation as bad as was generally believed, if indeed everything really was as we assumed; moreover, he thought the entire report highly unreliable, and was therefore of the opinion that we should take our chances and not make any changes. Since, in a war council, the one who wants to do nothing always wins, this was also the result here. Colonel Toll concurred with the

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state of wa r 18 0 0 author and it was decided to inform the Emperor that it would be best to stick with the previous dispositions. The Emperor opened the door. General Phull and Colonel Toll were admitted and the conference came to an end. The next day it turned out that the report was false; we reached the Drissa camp without seeing any enemy soldiers, except for the ones that pressed the rearguard.1

This brief scene presents in miniature some of the key elements in the conception of war around 1800. Clausewitz, who relates the story, dismisses Orlof’s complex suggestions for lack of practicality; he dismisses Toll’s more viable plans for lack of time; and finally he dismisses the report itself for lack of plausibility. The magnitude and character of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars gave rise to a conception of war as a world unto itself in which the usual understanding of time, space, and knowledge is profoundly reconfigured. The reconfiguration is indicated by the proposed scenarios in the narrative of the war council. The maneuvers suggested by the inexperienced Orlof are useless because he thinks in a two-dimensional abstract space instead of a concrete, empirical terrain; Toll’s plans, on the other hand, disregard the pressure of time; and finally, Clausewitz claims that action is planned on the basis of a kind of knowledge that is not based on fact but on degree of probability. In Clausewitz’s narrative, the spatiotemporal makeup of war, as well as the epistemic regime that governs it, bears no resemblance to the graphic order that prevailed in eighteenth-century military thought. Against the background of the Napoleonic revolution in the art of war, this chapter examines the larger conceptual transformation of war around 1800. In the writings of a number of influential thinkers such as Georg Heinrich von Berenhorst, Clausewitz, Otto August Rühle von Lilienstern, G. W. F. Hegel, and Pierre-Simon Laplace, among others, one can detect the emergence of a discourse on the state of war. What is this state? Here one must first and foremost consider military topography and probability theory, the new spatial and epistemic orders that come to organize the thinking of war around 1800.

Spatial Orders: Topography and the Empirical In 1797 the retired Prussian major Georg Heinrich von Berenhorst caused a stir in military circles with the publication of the first volume of his Betrachtungen über die Kriegskunst, über ihre Fortschritte, ihre Widersprüche und ihre

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Zuverlässigkeit (Observations on the Art of War, on Its Progress, Its Contradictions and Its Reliability).2 In the 1790s Berenhorst had immersed himself in the writings of Kant, and in 1795, concurrently with his philosophical readings, he began writing what eventually became the three volumes of the Betrachtungen. Kant’s reflections on time and space, cause and effect, and the freedom of the will informed Berenhorst’s work, but more than the subjects Kant analyzed it is his critical method that had the greatest impact. The book is, in Berenhorst’s own words, “a kind of Kantian critique [of the military sciences].”3 He attempts to apply the critical method to military science, to analyze and establish the limits for what military theory can justifiably say about warfare. Berenhorst’s application of the critical method, however, departs in significant ways from Kant’s critical project. First, the inquiry into the transcendental conditions of possibility of perception is exchanged for an examination of the validity of theoretical constructs; second, the world to which these constructs are applied is not conceived as a stable phenomenon governed by lawfulness. Berenhorst views war as a human activity that forms a world unto itself insofar as it is governed by specific operative rules, and this world he regards as a historical phenomenon that changes over time. His work sets out to describe the changing character of the phenomenon of war, and through a clear analysis of its developing structure and functioning he stakes out the limits for what military theory can claim about it. Following the historical nature of the subject matter, Berenhorst begins with a brief survey of the development of warfare. Around 1700, he writes, the science of Vauban and Coehoorn, based on immutable axioms of geometry, gave warfare its specific character: large armies were gathered in small districts that they seemed to inhabit more than attack. Accordingly military plans were equally limited in scope.4 As he later writes in a letter to Rühle von Lilienstern, “A fixed enemy position attracted them like a magnet: to storm, to scale the walls, to seek out the weakest side—that was all they knew.”5 By the time of the Seven Years’ War, however, the space of military efforts was beginning to expand. No longer constricted to the attack and defense of cities, war increasingly became an affair of movement in open space. Maneuvers became the new pattern of modern warfare. Berenhorst acknowledges this, yet he is right to point out that the geometrical paradigm remained in place: it was merely transferred from architecture to human beings, from the construction of buildings to the ordering of soldiers. The writings of Marquis de Puysegur (1655–1743) are exemplary for this transfer. Modeled on Vauban’s

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treatises on fortification, Puysegur’s Art de la guerre, par principes et par règles (Art of War, in Principles and Rules), published posthumously by his son in 1748, claims that “the foundation of the art of war is knowing how to form good ordres de bataille and how to make them move and operate according to the most perfect rules of movement; the principles of which are derived from geometry, which all officers must be familiar with.”6 His theoretical credo was explicitly to teach the art of war without the object itself, that is, “without war, without troops, without an army, without having to leave one’s home, simply by means of study, with a little geometry and geography.”7 Likewise one might regard the famed oblique movement used by Frederick II, in which he concentrated his troops at one end of the line in order to attack the enemy’s flank while keeping its main forces in check with the remainder of the troops, as the mobile complement to the angles of the fortification—the attempt to defeat the enemy through a reliance on spatial forms. As Jeremy Black notes, the precise execution of these complex maneuvers required highly disciplined and thoroughly drilled soldiers.8 The parade ground was the site where this order was inculcated. Here the disordered masses of soldiers were transformed, in Berenhorst’s words, into “stiff automata with their head turned to the right or to the left . . . that kept pace in strict order.”9 The parade ground was a spatial equivalent to the fortification: the level field and limited expanse on which a war instrument is erected that seeks to oppose the accidental with the principles of geometry. In this respect war was still a matter of architecture. The material had changed, but the principle of establishing a spatial order remained. Ideally wars were lost and won by the inculcation and deployment of a superior spatial order. Berenhorst seeks to expose the obsolescence of this conception of war. In particular he takes issue with the disregard for empirical space that persisted in military theory. In an acerbic critique he writes: The gracefully booted and closely panted legs operate alternately next to one another like the suspension of the threads in the lifting gear of a loom. . . . But the grand movement only affords the happy pleasure of the parade ground and often not even that. A field that has been plowed, a meadow that has been raked up greatly obstruct, harmony turns into dissonance. Everyone who has fallen out of step strives to find it again; for this purpose he must limp a few times and thereby falls behind. When

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some fall into step again others fall out of it, the front wavers. A maniple of poorly trained insurgents from eighty to a hundred smaller squads who have learned nothing except to keep the line and who moreover were as little in step as the horses of a squadron, would avoid this awkwardness in which the overly drilled battalion forfeits its sine qua non condition of its closed and parallel march, and nobody knows how to help himself. Tell me, why do you want to anchor on loose sand, why do you thirst for rational chimeras that deceive you? We seek, so goes the answer, the greatest degree of perfection, such that when circumstances won’t allow it, matters will at least find a mediocre solution. Wrong! You would be right in the case of morality: in tactics, however, the inevitable consequence of the failure to achieve the highest degree of perfection is not, as in morality, simply a less consummate order, but total confusion.10

If on the parade ground the projected order suffers shipwreck on the accidents of the empirical space, so much more on an actual battlefield. The space of war was not a building, nor was it an abstract, undifferentiated plane, but the largely unknown, boundless terrain. Further, the changes in the character of warfare that had emerged in the 1790s during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had transformed the strategy of maneuvering that had characterized the military efforts since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 and especially during the second half of the eighteenth century.11 Not only had the size of the armies increased vastly in sheer numbers, but their field of operations had also expanded significantly. Berenhorst’s critique is written from the perspective of these changes. Opposing the eighteenth-century conception of warfare, Berenhorst articulates a new spatial order characterized by, first, the expansion of the theater of war, and, second, the terrain, that is, a topographical space. First a look at the military changes that took place around 1800 and then an account of the discourse on the terrain to which they gave rise.

The Expansion of Military Space In 1793 the National Convention issued a decree declaring that the French people was subject to universal conscription. In addition to assigning various tasks to women, children, and old men, the so-called levée en masse, or general conscription, stated that all men between eighteen and twenty-five were drafted into military ser vice.12 By this measure the size of the French army increased greatly. During the campaign of 1805 the Grande Armée comprised about 150,000 soldiers,13 a number that would increase to approximately half

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a million at the beginning of the Russian campaign in 1812. By comparison Frederick II led about thirty thousand to forty thousand men into battle fifty years earlier.14 The change in the bulk of the army led to a reorganization of its structure. No longer a monolithic formation, the army was divided into separate divisions that each operated with a large degree of independence. For military historian Martin van Creveld, this decentralization constitutes “the greatest single revolution ever wrought in the art of command.”15 Now each division contained a full set of the different army branches; it was led by a complete military staff under the command of a general; and it operated independently as an army in its own right while following the general precepts staked out by Napoleon. The increase in size and the structural decentralization of the army meant that the Grande Armée could operate in an expanse of hitherto unseen proportions. Where a division could spread out between fifteen and thirty miles, the territory covered by the combined forces would reach an expanse of thousands of square miles.16 This entailed a transformation of the system of provisions. In the eighteenth century the reach of armies had been limited by their distance from their operational base, which provided the soldiers their daily sustenance. The logistics of provisions had therefore kept the expansion of operations in check.17 The French broke this limitation with the introduction of the system of requisitioning. Instead of relying solely on an operational base or on the cumbersome supply wagons, the army foraged off the land they traversed. Less dependent on a base for magazines and with a significantly lighter baggage train, the French armies became faster and more mobile.18 As Napoleon, according to Balzac, once noted, “The best soldier is not as much the one who fights as the one who marches.”19 Thereby another material condition was in place for the vast expansion of the actual as well as potential space of operations. Where the space of war had previously been shaped by a centripetal movement, it was now determined by a centrifugal force. In Clausewitz’s words, “Frederick II defeated with a single army two or three others; naturally, this could only take place one after the other. Therefore the troops that this army later encountered must lie idle in the interim. This, however, could only happen, because he concentrated his troops in space. The French proceeded in reverse. All their attacks on the most distant points of their enormous theater of war normally took place concurrently, but thereby they stretched their power tremendously, because the opponents copied them.”20 Warfare was beginning to move away from the

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“optical-acoustic presence” of the commander on the battlefield and toward long-distance management of multiple divisions and distinct battles.21 The necessary change in command structure that gave the generals in charge of a division a large degree of independence is reflected in the lower ranks as well, as a new element was added to the army: the tirailleur.22 This branch consisted of a group of soldiers who had not been drilled and were not ordered in the infantry columns that had begun to replace the older line formation. Instead they moved freely in front of the regular formation and shot into the dense columns of the enemy, while they themselves, only loosely organized and spread out over a larger area, were a more difficult target.23 At both the lower level within the army and at the higher level of the overall structure of the Grande Armée, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars witnessed a transformation of the practice of warfare away from the eighteenth-century wars of limited size and expanse fought by drilled corps and toward independence, mobility, and an expansion of the space of military operations.24 “Large-scale warfare” or grandes opérations were the central elements in the new spatial order.25

The Third Dimension: The Terrain and the Economy of Space Yet the transformation of the space of war in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century is not merely one of horizontal extension. The theaters of war stretched from Madrid to Moscow, but in these large territories military efforts took place in a space that was conceived differently than during the eighteenth century. The logistical and strategic demands that went into managing the armies and moving them across these large expanses effected a qualitative transformation of space. The concept of the terrain is central to this transformation. Coming to the modern European languages from Latin, the term originally designated the physical features of a stretch of land (via terra, “earth,” from terrenus, “made of earth”).26 But it acquired a military sense that gradually shifted from the area around a fortification, as conceived by Vauban, for example, to the natural features of open stretches of land regarded with a certain purpose in mind. When Zedler’s Universal-Lexicon describes das Terrain in 1744, it gives the area surrounding a fortification and then the area inside the fortification as the primary and secondary military meanings, but then it includes a third definition, namely the field or the ground on which two opposing armies meet for battle.27 During the second half of the eighteenth century, however, there is a shift of emphasis within the

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semantic field of the term, and with the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars this shift is completed. The terrain now becomes the central topic of numerous treatises that reconceptualize the space of war against the background of the changed nature of warfare. Supplanting the geometrical order of earlier theories, the terrain comes to serve as the shorthand for a topographical space. In the Prussian military discourse a number of new concepts were minted, all variations of the terrain under the main category of military geography, for example Terrainlehre, Terrainbeschreibung, Terrainschätzungslehre, Terrainkunde, Kriegserdbeschreibung, Kriegstopographie.28 The various concepts are connected by two main ideas. First, the terrain is understood as a vectorial space, that is, a space that must be traversed and that therefore requires an analysis of the features that either afford or hinder movement. Second, it is conceived as a tactical and strategic space; that is, it is regarded as an element in a military economy of means. A clear articulation of these ideas can be found in Rühle’s Handbuch für den Offizier zur Belehrung im Frieden und zum Gebrauch im Felde (Handbook for the Officer for Instruction in Peace and for Use in the Field) from 1817. In the first chapter, which considers the impact of the terrain on battle, he initially describes space as the general condition of possibility of movement, but then he proceeds to the specifics of military space: “If, on the one hand, the ground is the condition of possibility for movement, on the other hand it is a source of innumerable obstacles whereby the usual or original speed and maneuverability of different kinds of troops is often highly limited and at times it even hinders the use of them entirely. Steep rocks and chasms are often insurmountable even for a hunter in the Alps, in forests the cavalry is useless, on deep swampy roads the heavy artillery sinks etc.”29 Rocks, mountains, swamps, valleys constitute so many “terrain chicanes” that impede the traversal of a given territory.30 The natural features of the territory are divided into different segments based on the degree to which they either impede or afford movement. A plain offers little resistance, whereas a mountain is a “major obstacle.”31 The terrain is thus partitioned into different “space segments” with different vectorial values.32 To improve the possibilities of movement that are given naturally by the terrain, the branch of the army that comprised military engineers, sapeurs-mineurs, and pontonneers was charged with creating, improving, or destroying the “impediments or expedients” that affected the movement of the troops.33 In this way the terrain is defined by the conflict between the vectorial character of warfare and the obstacles presented by the

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territory. The goal was, first, to obtain accurate topographical knowledge in order to subject it to a vectorial analysis and, second, as far as possible to transform the natural obstacles into engineered passageways. As a consequence the terrain becomes part of a spatial economy that is governed by tactical and strategic purposes. Planning an entire campaign across vast expanses or the deployment of troops for a single battle, the commander would have to make the terrain a key element in the calculation.34 The terrain thus acquires a tactical and strategic value. The greater the military advantages over the enemy a given terrain offers, the greater its worth and the greater the effort to conquer it. If other spaces offer similar advantages, then this particular space has a lesser value and the gain or loss of it is of little importance.35 The value of the terrain is thus not inherent in the natural features; it depends on its relation to other spaces as well as on the purposes it is intended to serve: “For a space to conform to my intentions, it depends partly on its inner and outer properties, on its extension, on its location, on its relation to other spaces, on its local shape, on its form and fertility; partly on the kind of use I expect to make of it: whether it is to serve me only as an arena and medium of movement, or as a defensive weapon against the crush of the enemy, as a hideout and disguise of my weaknesses and dispositions, or whether I need it primarily as a source of energy and recuperation, as the basis of my physical and economico-military existence.”36 Rühle outlines a spatial economy in which the terrain functions as an element whose value is the average sum of the possibilities afforded by the natural features, its relation to other terrains, the function it is intended to serve, and the relationship between the opposing forces. The value of the terrain and its role in the tactical or strategic plans thus fluctuate with circumstances. Some terrains are important only “at certain times (continuously, momentarily, periodically),” and when these circumstances pass, so does the value of the terrain.37 Rühle’s handbook reflects the general views within military circles at the time.38 If rivers, forests, and mountains remained largely unchanged throughout the eighteenth century, the third dimension emerges as a pervasive problem in military theory only around 1800, when the changed nature of warfare led to massive practical, logistical, and organizational difficulties. Of course the development within military thought did not take place in a vacuum. Within the larger field of physical geography, Philippe Buache had generated interest in both the horizontal and the vertical structures of the earth’s surface in 1752, when he called for an examination of the “charpente de la terre,” the frame or

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skeleton of the earth. As Chenxi Tang has shown, this interest would also inform Wilhelm von Humboldt’s writings on geography, and it culminated in the “pure geography” around 1800 that focused exclusively on the spatial configuration of the earth’s surface.39 Military thinkers could therefore draw on a development within geography proper that began at around the same time it became customary to fight in virtually “inaccessible regions,” as Clausewitz writes with reference to the Seven Years’ War.40 Yet the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars drove this tendency so far that a military treatise from 1828 on the terrain regards the spatial practice effected by Napoleon as a complete rupture with all previous practices. The author of the treatise, Ludwig Freidrich Erck, claims that works of military theory before this period have no value other than as historical documents.41 Erck, who coins the term Terrainschätzungslehre to designate the branch of military theory that deals with the evaluation of the tactical or strategic advantages or disadvantages of the terrain,42 claims that where other kinds of knowledge are important for different kinds of troops, all officers must develop this ability, since almost every important enterprise in warfare is now preceded by an examination of the terrain.43 The central importance of the terrain is summed up by Georg Venturini in his Lehrbuch der Strategie (Textbook on Strategy) published in 1799: “This knowledge of the country is the soul of all movement, of all decisions to make camp, it is the preeminent ground that gives the advantages of a victory the greatest extension; it is the basis of all operations without which no great commander, nor any clever leader of war left to himself, can think.”44 With the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars the third dimension emerged as the condition of possibility of large-scale warfare, and it became part of a spatial economy whose management was the task of officers and generals. While crucial to the conduct of war, this terrain management was nevertheless such a new phenomenon that, as Rühle puts it, almost all European armies still “display a quite wondrous ineptitude” in this regard.45

“Unlost in Philosophical Dreams” Whatever the practical shortcomings, the conception of the space of war had undergone a transformation since the heyday of fortification. The break from the treatises of Vauban is evident, but the writings on military space around 1800 also differ insofar as the treatises of some of the military thinkers present a philosophically inflected theory of space that takes its cue from Kant, while departing from him in significant ways. As mentioned earlier, Berenhorst con-

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sidered his Betrachtungen to be a kind of Kantian critique of the science of war. Rühle in his Handbuch at one point invokes the Kantian definition of space and time as transcendental categories, but he then proceeds to discuss the terrain and its shifting values.46 While space and time constitute the necessary conditions for all sense perception, the terrain constitutes the a priori for modern warfare. According to Rühle, warfare has necessitated an investigation of space not as a transcendental category in the Kantian sense but as an empirical one, not one that centers on the universal capacities of the subject but one that focuses on the makeup of the outside world, on physical space and its shifting functions. He thus exchanges the forms of intuition for a topographical space, for an investigation of the terrain and the third dimension as the empirical a priori of modern warfare. The focus on topography forms part of a larger shift in thinking around 1800. Where German idealist philosophy from Kant to Hegel emphasized the role of the subject in the constitution of the outer world, the Napoleonic Wars gave rise to an intellectual countercurrent, but one that is articulated not in the formal treatises of philosophy but in the paraphilosophical discourse of military theory and literature. These texts might be said to constitute an empirical turn, in the sense that they shift the focus to the phenomenal world and investigate the ways the outside world conditions the possibilities of the subject. Warfare, and specifically the Napoleonic Wars, in which, to quote Clausewitz, the French had unshackled “the horrible element of war [that] now marched forth in its raw violence,” presented upheavals that put the world in a state of permanent mutability and uncertainty.47 To attempt to come to grips with this momentous transformation, the method of speculative philosophy is inverted and the top-down approach is exchanged for an investigation that takes its starting point in the midst of the empirical. In a letter from 1808 Clausewitz outlines the basic elements of this program: “Great, indescribably great are our times; few people understand it; for even the most prominent scholars and sages among us they are rarely more than an instrument to present some obscure system of thought; all that is the vain play of children and lunatics. Our times must be perceived by a sensing mind [Gemüt]; we must regard it and observe it without prejudice. Only in a sensing mind [Gemüt] full of drive can the eventful future announce itself; it must be constantly in touch with the present and the past and unlost in philosophical dreams.”48 One such philosophical dream was Fichte’s transcendental theory, with its emphasis on the subject’s positing (setzen) of the ‘I’ in relation to the ‘non-I.’ Berenhorst

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claimed that theories such as this one display a complete blindness to the impact of the outer world on the subject. In 1805 he published a number of aphorisms that conclude with this comment: A final word on the separation of philosophy from common sense. What kind of system is it in which I am incessantly forced to act against the system in order not to be a fool?—The world is in me, I posit it! and yet every day I act, from the time I get up until I go to bed, in a world outside of me; it gives me impressions against my will, often it throws hard punches; frequently I am completely unable to think about the things I want to think about, on the contrary I am assaulted by thoughts that I cannot get rid of with all my autonomous power. A supporter of this system should at least become a bit more skeptical when his ‘I’ sees itself forced repeatedly to posit the passing and disappearance of so many cherished ‘non-I’s and in the process exposes itself to danger, namely that at some point, one might say out of distraction or mechanically, becoming too accustomed to positing or as an experiment, it will posit its own evaporation into the Beyond; for lacking the care to posit itself back into its own residence, the author of all ideal positing who, to the chagrin of deep speculation, still remains very real, might, in its absence, suddenly have started to rot and molder.49

Berenhorst’s quarrel with Fichte is not merely that his work falls within the field of speculative philosophy but also that in his theory the subject is autopoetic—determined first and foremost by itself.50 Against the idea that the ego is the fundamental reality and that this ego posits itself and the world as a way of defining itself, Berenhorst’s empirical subject is constantly engaged by the outer world. Instead of positing the world authoritatively, the subject has come under attack by a hostile world that severely restricts the subject’s field of possibilities. Berenhorst proposes a model that gives priority to the surroundings in relation to the subject. This model structures the relation between the individual and the empirical world and even the mental realm, in which one’s own thought processes cannot be controlled since outside thoughts impose upon the mind. Berenhorst’s military treatise shows the impact of war on the philosophical tradition in two ways: military theory is regarded as a field that has philosophical import, and at the same time it places itself in direct opposition to the idealist tradition of the time. After over a decade of pan-European warfare, the idealist conception of the relation between the mind and the world

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seemed either thwarted by actual events or simply irrelevant to the present state of affairs. In a sense the empirical world had struck back at philosophical systems that give priority to the subject. What needed to be investigated was first and foremost the makeup and functioning of the outer world since it determined directly the role and possibilities of the subject. In a short note entitled “Bei Gelegenheit deutscher Philosophen die es gut meinen” (On German Philosophers with Good Intentions) Clausewitz distances himself from a kind of philosophy that does not take the actual state of aff airs into consideration: “Vain, despicable, wretched philosophy that wants to place us at a standpoint high above the hustle and bustle of the present such that we withdraw from its pressure and all the inner resistance in our bosom stops!”51 A philosophy that places the individual outside the pressures of time disregards the defining and pervasive phenomenon around 1800, war, and constructs an erroneous perception of the subject since the state of war changes the possibilities of subjective action profoundly. Situated in a concrete historical environment, the actions of an individual are reactions and resistance rather than autonomous acts. The paraphilosophical program of the military thinkers does not leave the subject out of the picture, but as with the perception of space, an empirical subject defined by the given situation in which it finds itself supplants the transcendental subject as the object of inquiry.52 Kant’s successor in Königsberg, Wilhelm Traugott Krug, exemplifies the intellectual impact of the wars even within traditional philosophy. When Kant died in 1804, Krug was chosen as his replacement for the chair of logic and metaphysics, a position he held until 1809 when he accepted a professorship in philosophy in Leipzig. Four years later, however, he joined the Saxon army to fight Napoleon;53 when he returned he continued to lecture on speculative philosophy, but he also offered a course entitled Encyclopädie der Kriegswissenschaften. It was published in 1815 under the title System der Kriegswissenschaften und ihrer Literatur, enzyklopädisch dargestellt von Wilhelm Traugott Krug, öff entlichem Lehrer der philosophischen und Privatlehrer der KriegsWissenschaften auf der Universität zu Leipzig (A System of the Military Sciences and Their Literature, Presented Encyclopedically by Wilhelm Traugott Krug, Public Teacher of Philosophy and Private Teacher of the Military Sciences at the University of Leipzig). In his treatise Krug defines war as the production of forces in relation to the time and space in which they operate, and he explicitly considers space as a concrete terrain, the knowledge of which he claims is indispensable for waging war.54 In this he is in line with the military theorists

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of his time. That a treatise on the science of war would become the subject for a speculative philosopher and that he regards himself as a teacher of both fields, however, displays a more fundamental interest in warfare. In opposition to the reigning trend in philosophy, the Napoleonic Wars give rise to an empirical inquiry that examines war as a pervasive condition, an alternate state that reconfigures the traditional concepts of speculative philosophy. As Berenhorst explicitly states, Kant’s investigation of time, space, and causality is not abandoned, but it is relocated. Its starting point now lies in the midst of the empirical, not in the structures of the mind. Instead of mapping out universal a priori forms of intuition, that is, the conditions of possible experience, military thinkers attempted to establish the fundamental empirical conditions for the conduct of modern war: the topography of the actual terrain, its place in a spatial economy, the pressures of time, the interdependence of military events, the operational logic of war. In this way a new vocabulary, developed from empirical phenomena, replaces the transcendental conception of space and time as well as the earlier conceptual framework of war informed by geometry. In Clausewitz’s words, “Philosophy and experience must never despise nor exclude each other.”55 The empirical turn within military philosophy was not merely an intellectual exercise but a matter of considerable practical importance. If a deeper understanding of the basic structure of the new kind of warfare was overshadowed by traditional philosophical ideas, decisions of the wrong type would be made—decisions tailored to a world that would have little to do with the one in which they would have their effect. To become, as Clausewitz writes, “unlost in philosophical dreams,” military thinkers needed to turn their gaze outward and develop a conceptual apparatus adequate to the state of war. Other wise speculative dreams might very quickly develop into a military nightmare such as the Prussian defeat in 1806. This is the general layout of the paraphilosophical program. But what does it entail? For military thinkers around 1800, the new spatial order is inseparable from the epistemic regime that governed war. As the expansion of military operations leads to a qualitative change of space in the discourse on the terrain, it also leads to a transformation of epistemology. If around 1700 the theory of war was informed by a graphic epistemology guided by geometry, around 1800 chance becomes one of the most urgent problems that military thinkers tried to come to grips with.

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Knowledge Orders: “L’Empire du Hazard” and Average Truths That Berenhorst’s Betrachtungen attracted so much attention was in no small measure due to its radical epistemology. The theory of knowledge he propounds is based on the recent developments in warfare. Where the limited wars during the eighteenth century had been waged with a great degree of control, as reflected in the treatises on fortification, the transformation of warfare during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars ushers in a new epistemic order. While there is no dearth of treatises that regard warfare as a science,56 Berenhorst claims that the new kind of large-scale warfare waged on the European continent has turned war into “l’empire du hazard,” the empire of chance: “The theaters of war have expanded due to the excessive number of troops, due to the boldness of the endeavors, due to the atrocity of the behavior towards the neutral and the weak, so much is true; but along with the theaters of war, where one no longer fights in pitched battles, but instead more often with detached corps, the empire of chance has expanded proportionally, and that is what the vaunted whims of science are reduced to when considered impartially.”57 A hazardous empire, war is dangerous not merely because individual lives are at risk but also because it forms a stochastic world that does not display any regularity, a world not governed by any laws. According to Berenhorst, war has become an epistemological hazard because it has developed into a system whose operations display a pattern of pure randomness. As such it resists rational theorizing and can neither be predicted nor controlled. Berenhorst therefore finds the attempts of military thinkers to set up rules and principles of tactics and strategy as so many “Hirngeburten” or “rational chimera” because they fail to realize that as soon as battle commences, all planning is suspended because the fighting immediately devolves into “disorder and wild shooting.”58 War emerges as a fundamentally contingent phenomenon, a phenomenon whose outcome can neither be predicted nor subsequently explained.59 For Berenhorst the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars mark a caesura in history, both from a military and an epistemological point of view, but he further claims that warfare was infused with contingency already in the eighteenth century. Military victories, even the renowned victories of Frederick II, are therefore the result not of knowledge and superior skill but merely of chance: “Torgau confirms, in double measure, the experience of the inadequacy of the art of war: as long as they were carrying out the plans of the king . . . they were lost;

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as soon as night fell, which for the blind Goddess is equal to day, victory was theirs.”60 In an exchange of divinities, Fortuna takes the place not of Mars but of the Olympian overview of Frederick as the arbiter of war. Blind chance, not carefully planned tactics, decides the battle. The introduction of Fortuna goes against the tendency to eliminate chance as an operative factor of history in the eighteenth century. Frederick himself wrote in 1740 that “luck and chance are empty words without meaning”; they are merely vague names that obscure the fact that apparently inexplicable occurrences are simply the effects of unknown causes.61 As opposed to the earlier providential view of history, Fortuna (i.e., chance) became an immanent cause whose nominal inexplicability could be dissolved by further inquiry. Reinhart Koselleck writes, “Punctual chance is then revealed to be a bundle of causes, it becomes a pure name without reality.”62 As such the accidental is transformed from a transcendent into an immanent category, and it is also transformed into the unforeseen. Chance thereby became the subject of planning as an object of exclusion. According to Koselleck, the rational organization of the Prussian state that Frederick implemented sought to set strict limits on the influence of unforeseen events and thus, as far as possible, to eliminate chance both as a transcendent and as an immanent category. The attempt to exclude chance as an operative factor during the Enlightenment was not restricted to state governance; it also included warfare. Thus in the Geschichte des Siebenjährigen Krieges in Deutschland (History of the Seven Years’ War in Germany) from 1791, Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz regards chance as strategically irrelevant to the wars because its impact was held in check by the rationality of the techniques and the limited scope of the wars.63 Archenholz thus reaffirms at the end of the century the epistemology that had informed the treatises of fortification at the beginning of it.64 When Berenhorst introduces Fortuna into war six years later, he therefore goes against the tendency to eliminate chance in the eighteenth century. Evidently Fortuna is here not the cipher of providence it was in the earlier conception of fortune.65 It appears as the immanent concept conceived by Frederick, but now its reign has expanded to such a degree that it can be neither contained nor controlled. In spite of the fact that Frederick is acknowledged to be a superior strategist compared to any other commander of his day, he was operating in a sphere of human activity in which there are “so many concatenations of circumstances with fortuitous events,” every one of which de-

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stroyed his science of war.66 Not only his victories and but also his losses can be ascribed only to chance.67 When both Puysegur and Maurice de Saxe claim that a return to the principles of the ancient Romans will provide a secure foundation for the science of war, Berenhorst comments, “No teacher can make themselves begin with the confession: his science lacks all elements, the entire field is governed by chance.”68 Berenhorst projects chance back into the eighteenth century, and he gleefully quotes Frederick’s concession in his memoirs, that he had often been forced “to let chance [Hazard] reign.”69 The claim is, then, that already during the Seven Years’ War, war was infused with contingency, and as the scope and complexity of warfare expanded at the turn of the century what had been merely the province of chance had grown to an empire. The insistence on the rule of contingency transfers agency from the subject to the world. In an inversion of Fichte’s idealist model, Berenhorst’s empirical model presents the subject as the plaything of a stochastic world that defies any attempt to comprehend or control it. In his view chance has become the defining characteristic of war.

Hegel and the Epiphenomenology of Chance While the emerging thinking on war adopted a critical stance toward idealist philosophy, the wars would impress themselves on the form of idealist thought itself, albeit negatively. Writing Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of Spirit) in the midst of the War of the Fourth Coalition, Hegel sensed the momentous changes the wars brought about. In the first introduction to the Phenomenology he writes, “Our times are times of birth and of the transition to another period.” Gradual changes in the past left no mark on the “physiognomy of the whole,” but now the world has been struck by “lightning [which] instantly arranged the structure of the new world.”70 Unlike Clausewitz, who attributes the historical caesura directly to the wars, however, Hegel famously locates it in the transformation of the underlying nature of reality: it is der Geist, the spirit, which is mutating and about to let its earlier form “sink into the past” as it restructures itself.71 When Hegel therefore sees Napoleon on the eve of the Battle of Jena in 1806, he famously characterizes him as the embodiment of the world soul: “I saw the Emperor—this world soul—ride through town on reconnaissance;—truly, it is a marvelous sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here to a point, sitting on a horse, reaches out across the world and rules it.”72 In the Phenomenology the development of this

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complex entity follows a trajectory that gradually turns away from the empirical world and from the perception of matter and instead turns inward toward itself. Hegel’s work maps out the “path of the soul, which journeys through the series of its configurations as though walking through the stations prescribed for it by its own nature, in order to purify itself into spirit and thereby, through the complete experience of itself, finally reaches the understanding of what it is in itself.”73 His contemporaries too embroiled in earthly things (“das Irdische”),74 Hegel must forcefully change the direction of the examining mind to a self-reflexive inward turn, or a “withdrawal into itself ” (“Insichgehen”), whereby the mind passing through various stages gradually becomes self-aware and recognizes the self in the self, “the absolute double vision of itself.”75 With its monumental theory-building and speculative metaphysical postulates, Hegel’s Phenomenology is emblematic of the kind of philosophy that military thinkers vehemently opposed.76 In his later Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (Lectures on the Philosophy of History) the metaphysical elements become more explicit, but at the same time he develops a theory of chance that takes its cue from the state of war.77 According to Hegel, the periods of peace are merely empty pages in a world history that is brought forward only by the tension of discord and opposition.78 It is therefore not accidental that the three “world historical individuals” he explicitly names are all military commanders: Caesar, Alexander, and Napoleon. Wars bring the world spirit to its next level of development, and as “managing directors of the world spirit” (“Geschäftsführer des Weltgeistes”) these three world historical individuals have all functioned as its instruments.79 This is where Hegel’s theory becomes interesting for my purposes, for the development of the world spirit through war leads Hegel to do three things: first, he conceives of warfare as a realm of absolute chance; second, he extends this conception of chance by applying the metaphorical frame of war or battle to empirical phenomena as such; and third, in the same metaphorical application he makes an absolute division of the contingent and the necessary: It is the particular that fights hard with itself and a part of which is destroyed. It is not the universal idea that enters into conflict and combat; it keeps itself in the background unassailed and unharmed. This we can call the cunning of reason, namely that it lets the passions work in its ser vice, such that the particular, through which it gives itself existence, must pay

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the penalty and suffer the loss. For the particular belongs to the phenomenal world of which a part is void and a part is positive. The particular is mostly too minor in comparison to the universal, the individuals are sacrificed and abandoned. The idea pays the tribute of existence and of transience not out of its own pocket, but with the passions of individuals. [ . . . ] We may accept that individuals, their aims and the satisfaction of these aims are sacrificed, that their happiness as such is given over to the empire of chance [dem Reiche der Zufälligkeit] to which it belongs, and that individuals fall under the category of means.80

Structuring the phenomenal realm of appearances with military metaphors, Hegel conceives of it as a battlefield on which danger and chance reign supreme. A clever tactician, however, reason stays unharmed in the background while orchestrating the plan of action implemented by the passionate and mortal appearances, for it “does not run around in the external game of chance, rather it is that which determines absolutely, and it is directly opposed to the chance occurrences that it controls and uses for its own purposes.”81 The realm of chance, which Berenhorst claimed was synonymous with war, in Hegel becomes a model for the general state of the empirical world. While in the Phenomenology Hegel writes that “war is the spirit,”82 in the Lectures he specifies its military character: here the spirit is conceived not as war itself but as a commanding general standing on a hill overlooking the battle whose masterful and necessary management of the accidental effects its progression to the next stage in its world historical development.83 The relation between the military commander and the state of war is mapped onto the relation between the transcendent spirit and the world of particulars. Hegel’s speculative philosophy thus conceives the empirical particulars in a manner analogous to Berenhorst’s empire of chance, but he further subjects the accidental phenomenal world to the necessity of the transcendent historical movement. When he speaks of the realization of the spirit, “it has nothing to do with individual empirical instances; for they can be better or worse, as the case may be, because the concept has authorized the forces of contingency and particularity to exercise their vast influence in the empirical sphere.”84 In themselves empirical phenomena are mere accidental epiphenomena, the foam of history. While Hegel brings contingency into the heart of the empirical, it is only in order to install an absolute division between the accidental and the necessity and teleology of the spirit—a division that allows him to dismiss

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contingency altogether.85 Separating the phenomenal empire of chance from the transcendent development of necessity, he erects a double ontology in which the latter is assigned “reality” (“Wirklichkeit”), while the former is merely possessed of “foul existence” (“faule Existenz”).86 And as such, chance is excluded as a topic of world history.87 Existent, but not real, chance is pervasive but only as a meaningless epiphenomenon that falls outside of history proper. Whether or not one follows Hegel in his assumption of a second ontological layer, he presents a strong case for the radical contingency of the empirical world, and he does so by using the state of war as a figure or a structuring metaphor for the state of the phenomenal world tout court. Hegel’s seemingly paradoxical move is to at once ascribe war a central role in his philosophical scheme and yet to immediately dismiss it as unreal. Chance is central, but it is excluded from the philosophy of history and mentioned only insofar as it makes visible the underlying movement of the spirit. Where Hegel’s empirical world is thus possessed only of existence or negative reality, the empirical world of a military thinker such as Berenhorst is not merely existent but thoroughly real. Without the metaphysical underpinnings, the contingency of war is seen not as an epiphenomenon but as its very nature. While the epistemology put forth by Berenhorst and the ontology presented by Hegel constitute analogous responses to the wars, Berenhorst affirms what Hegel denies. To put it pointedly, out of the Napoleonic Wars are born both an empire of chance and a teleology of necessity. Extremes such as these, however, leave a large middle ground unoccupied. Skeptical of both the theories of complete randomness and of those that sought to make war a rational science, Clausewitz seeks to steer a middle course and to conceive of war in terms that mediate between pure chance and iron necessity.88 The difficult task he sets himself is to develop a vocabulary to describe the complex epistemic order he had experienced in the wars and to develop a tool that can manage it. Once again mathematics informs the thinking of war, but now a different branch of mathematics. With Clausewitz, geometry, as the conceptual grid that structured the theory of war, is replaced by probability theory.

Probable Worlds Much of the scholarship on Clausewitz has focused on the relation between politics and war. Yet one of the groundbreaking elements in his thinking on war, which has received little attention, is his epistemology, in particular the

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transposition of probability theory from the field of mathematics onto that of war.89 Mathematics had long been an important subject at military academies, but it was centered on ballistics and fortification and thus primarily devoted to geometry.90 Clausewitz has little but contempt for the continued application of geometry to modern warfare—“Mathematics has as much to do with actual warfare as with a sermon”91—and he therefore deems it wise “to leave behind these pedantic, mindless imitations of mathematics.”92 Yet he does not dismiss mathematics as such. Around 1806–1807 he latched onto the discourse within the branch of mathematics that dealt with the theory of probability, and he applied it to warfare soon after. Although Clausewitz formulates the conception of war as a system of probabilities already around this time, its clearest statement is found in books 1 and 2 of his magnum opus, Vom Kriege (On War). At the beginning of the work, Clausewitz develops the concept of absolute war, that is, war as a pure concept in the sense that it has been purified from all the limitations and restrictions of the real world. What interests him, however, is the nature of actual warfare. It is this move from the pure concepts of abstract theory to a theory of practice that introduces probability theory. Section 10 of the first chapter in book 1 bears the title “The Probabilities of Real Life Take the Place of the Extreme and the Absolute of Concepts.”93 When abstract enemies are manifested in actual nations, armies, and generals, the theory of war undergoes a similar transubstantiation. In the flesh, war is governed not by absolute truths but by “laws of probability” that are based on available data and that produce more or less probable truths.94 Like Berenhorst, Clausewitz conceives of war as a phenomenon that is pervaded by contingencies, but unlike Berenhorst, he claims that there are laws that govern such contingency, namely the laws of probability.95 When planning for war, the officer should not adopt a methodological approach based on rational demonstration proceeding from previously established axioms. Rather planning consists in calculating the probabilities of each event and comparing them to each other in order to find the most probable case. In the chapter “Method” in book 2 of On War he writes, “The goal is . . . for the method to be calculated on the most probable cases. It is therefore not based on determined, specific premises, but rather on the average probability [Durchschnittswahrscheinlichkeit] of analogous cases, and the result is to produce an average truth [Durchschnittswahrheit].”96 In other words, warfare institutes a different epistemic regime that operates not by axioms but by “laws of probability.”97 The

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exchange of geometry for probability in the conception of war thus carries with it a different claim with regard to the status of knowledge. Traditionally Scholastics and Cartesians required an epistemic model that produced certainty through rational demonstration, but, as several scholars have noted, the rise of probability theory introduced a practical epistemic model that offered only limited certainty but could guide action and decision making in situations where knowledge was incomplete.98 When Clausewitz therefore conceives of warfare in terms of probability theory, he opens it to an epistemic order that operates in the complex field between the certainty of Euclidian geometry and the randomness of Berenhorst’s theory. Without a secure foundation, knowledge in war is inherently uncertain, but it can be organized by a calculus that measures the degree of probability of each piece of information. Or, in Clausewitz’s terms, in the epistemic regime that governs war, “truth” is transformed into “probability,” which, when compounded, produces an “average probability” that can be taken for an “average truth.” Probable averages take the place of demonstrable truth. This transformation within the epistemic order puts Clausewitz at odds with the evaluation of different knowledge claims in contemporary philosophy. For Hegel probability “is nothing compared to truth.” As against pure concepts, it is a debased and incomplete form of knowledge.99 For Clausewitz, however, war is pervaded by a type of event that makes probability theory the only effective means with which to comprehend and manage it. Aristotle describes this type of event in his Peri Hermeneias (On Interpretation). He calls them ‘potentialities’; they have become known as ‘future contingents.’ He explains, “In those things which are not continuously actual there is a potentiality in either direction. Such things may either be or not be; events also therefore may either take place or not take place.”100 The Greek term for this type of event is ἐνδεχόμενον (endechomenon), which in Boethius’s Latin translation became contingens.101 Events that are neither impossible nor necessary are thus contingent. Aristotle’s well-known example of the sea battle follows this logic. While it is necessary that a sea battle either will or will not take place tomorrow, it is not necessary that it will take place, nor is it necessary that it will not take place. The event in Aristotle’s example, however, treats warfare, in this case naval warfare, as a single event on par with a number of other contingent events, for example, whether his coat will wear out before it is cut in two or vice versa. The sea battle stands out neither from other future contingents nor from nonmilitary events. In the eighteenth century, as James

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Q. Whitman has argued, the pitched battle was seen as a legal event in which monarchs could win territorial and material rights. The outcome of the battle was generally acknowledged by both winners and losers because by waging war both parties had tacitly entered a contract of chance. Chance, or sors, as jurists called it, formed the basis for the legitimacy of victory, but to have a legally binding effect, the pitched battle was regarded as a whole. From the legal perspective, whatever the contingencies that arose on the battlefield, the outcome of the procedure was considered as a single, unified event.102 In Clausewitz’s military theory, however, warfare is made up of an infinite number of minuscule, contingent events: “War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of those things on which action in war is based, lie in the fog of a greater or lesser uncertainty.”103 Or, as he puts it elsewhere, war has become an “empire of possible events.”104 Probability now pervades every pore of warfare, not just battle as a singular event, be it as a legal procedure or as a philosophical concept. And it is in order to deal with these multiple potentialities that Clausewitz shifts the framework from geometry to probability theory. The new epistemic situation has an impact on the nature of decision making. To manage the dizzying number of more or less probable futures, the commander must perform a Wahrscheinlichkeitskalkül, that is, a probability calculus.105 According to Clausewitz, the soldiers in the lower ranks rarely need to reflect carefully, but as we move up the ranks the level of complexity rises.106 As the leading topographers of France wrote in the first decade of the nineteenth century, the expansion of operational space entailed a corresponding expansion of imagined space, “a somewhat extended way of looking at things.”107 The military commander is therefore faced with a Herculean mathematical task when he performs his probability calculus. “In this sense,” Clausewitz writes, “Napoleon was right when he said that several of the commander’s decisions would constitute a task of mathematical calculation not unworthy of the mental powers of a Newton or an Euler.”108 In a more skeptical variation, Clausewitz believes that even Newton would shy away from such a task.109 Already in the immediate aftermath of the Prussian disaster at Jena and Auerstedt, Clausewitz had immersed himself in mathematics, and while he does not provide specifics as to its kind, the theory that emerged soon afterward leaves little doubt that he was studying probability theory. In a letter to his future wife, Marie, from February 28, 1807, he writes, “Daily I learn more of the difficult tasks that mathematics is able to solve, how it extracts the quantity,

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which has been complicated by a thousand circumstances and modifications and which seems to elude human understanding entirely, by a truly divine art from this labyrinth and presents it pure and simple—oh, if only a master of this art could extricate from the convoluted circumstances of our life the hour in which you will give me your hand forever!”110 The jest of using mathematics as a tool to organize complexity and to provide a window into the future in matrimonial matters would become a more serious theory when he applied it to warfare shortly after. The extent to which probability theory came to inform his way of thinking can be seen already in his essay “Ueber die künftigen Kriegs-Operationen Preußens gegen Frankreich” (“Concerning Prussia’s future military operations against France”) written in 1807–1808. Arguing for a Prussian insurrection against the French occupation, Clausewitz attempts to persuade his opponents with a variation of an argument used by Pascal in his Pensées (Thoughts). Clausewitz states that in both politics and war the proper procedure is not “to obtain an advantageous war situation and then to calculate the absolute probability of a great success, but to choose the lesser of two evils.”111 One should not rule out a military option that is merely possible but not very probable, if only the political goal that might be achieved is of paramount importance. In the present case Clausewitz claims that Prussia should rebel against the French even though victory is highly improbable because the value of national independence outweighs all the dangers involved in bringing it about.112 Pascal, whose wager subjects the existence of God to a probability calculus, claimed that since the gain of believing in God is infinite, namely eternal life, and the stakes only one’s finite life, then with a 50 percent chance of God’s existence, any reasonable human being must bet that God exists and act accordingly.113 In Clausewitz’s version the odds are not fifty-fifty, but even with lower odds the inclusion into the probability calculus of the infinite value of the political goal tips the scale in favor of insurrection. He writes, “The importance of the goal [must] stand in relation to the danger one runs. But there is no goal that is politically more important than the independence of the state and the nation. This must be pursued under even the greatest dangers.”114 War may well be the continuation of politics by other means, but for Clausewitz both fields are subject to probabilistic calculation. The realm of probability reaches far in Clausewitz’s theory. It pertains to the visible elements of war, but also to invisible elements such as political intentions and emotions. It is a commonplace that one of Clausewitz’s main contributions to the theory of war is his emphasis on the effect of the emotions,115

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but it is important to note that emotions are also included in the probability calculus: “Nothing seems more narrow-minded to me than to calculate only with flesh and blood, and powder and lead, and to disregard the moral dimension entirely.”116 As an example he gives the courage of despair, which, when the balance of the material means are to one’s disadvantage, might nevertheless have enough weight to tip the scales in one’s favor.117 This kind of courage in the face of immediate danger, however, is complemented by courage of a different type, namely the courage to “calculate with uncertain elements and to base one’s plan of action on them.”118 The moral factors thus play a double role in the probabilistic calculus: on the one hand, the minds of the rank-and-file soldiers are regarded as data, “the data . . . that grounds this calculation according to the laws of probability.”119 On the other hand, the mind of the person performing the probability calculus itself enters as a variable in the calculation. As indicators of future contingents, of potential events, the timidity, pride, initiative, and daring of the commander are as important as the moral and material factors at his disposal.120 Clausewitz therefore concludes, “Any person who does not want to calculate with these things, will never be a good general, and if he is weak his mathematical calculation will lead him to apathy.”121

Laplace and Napoleon’s Improbable Empire A central figure in the development of probability theory around 1800 was Pierre-Simon Laplace. Already in 1774 Laplace had published an influential essay on inverse probability,122 and in 1814 he published his widely read Essai philosophique sur les probabilités (Philosophical Essay on Probabilities), which was added as an introduction to his longer, more technical treatise from 1812 on the same topic, Théorie analytique des probabilités (Analytic Theory of Probabilities).123 Laplace argues for a general shift toward probability as the epistemological framework of our knowledge in virtually all fields and toward probability theory as the means with which to analyze and manage it. The first edition of the Théorie analytique des probabilités includes a dedication to Napoleon in which he writes, “This delicate calculation extends to the most important questions in life, which are indeed mostly questions of probability.”124 This applies not only to phenomena that fall within the purview of the natural sciences but also to the moral sciences. From the birth of probability theory around 1650 to the period around 1800, the field had expanded beyond the confounds of a purely mathematical theory to encompass a host of phenomena from the everyday world.125 Indeed in lecture courses on security, governmentality, and

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biopower held at the Collège de France, Foucault argues that the gradual development of a concept of the population in political theory went hand in hand with the growth of a security apparatus that used statistics and probability as a means to organize, regulate, and optimize the affairs of the state. Thus the emerging sciences of the state in the eighteenth century, such as cameralism (Cameralwissenschaft) and the police sciences (Policeywissenschaft) in Germany, as well as the earlier “political arithmetic” in England developed by John Graunt and William Petty in the seventeenth century, were all based on the premise that to govern and optimize the affairs of the state, the state first and foremost had to obtain a comprehensive, quantitative knowledge of itself. It is this self-reflexive knowledge concept that is eventually designated by the term Statistik, coined by Gottfried Achenwall in 1749. Yet in its incipient form statistics was faced with various problems. As Foucault intimates and Ian Hacking explains, the statistical apparatus necessary for efficient management was not yet in place in the eighteenth century. Even though the reign of Friedrich Wilhelm I (1713–1740) saw the beginning of enumerations and the founding of the first chairs of cameralism in 1727, the first centralized statistical bureau was not founded until 1805 by Friedrich Wilhelm III.126 Given the lack of comprehensive and reliable data sets, the attempt to moralize mathematics, as Lorraine Daston puts it, was dominated by smaller and more manageable settings such as courtroom situations and questions of evidence and judgment.127 Only in the first half of the nineteenth century, with the collection and publication of an enormous quantity of data concerning mass social phenomena, did statistics and probability theory become truly powerful tools for the management of the general affairs of state. By 1850 statisticians had the numerical data ready at hand that enabled them to apply probability theory to such diverse areas as crime, suicides, illness, and life expectancies. They thereby created the foundation for our contemporary world of big data. Already at the turn of the nineteenth century, however, the fields that were regarded from a probabilistic point of view were multiplying, and Laplace himself considered the relation between probability and warfare in the Essai philosophique. Laplace is a transitional figure in the history of probability theory, and to grasp the probabilistic framework within which he analyzes war, we must first distinguish between two kinds of probability. Subjective or epistemic probability designates the degree of belief that a given event will occur. The kind of probability that developed in the nineteenth century, however, is often known as frequentist or objective probability.128 As the name indicates, it des-

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ignates the frequency of a given event, and its probability is based on a large number of past occurrences. Death rates, birth rates, and crime rates are of this kind. Not until the mid-nineteenth century were these two kinds of probability clearly distinguished from each other, and probabilists from Jakob Bernoulli to Laplace would shift from one use of the term to the other without blinking.129 Yet even if Laplace did not always respect the distinction, he was aware of it. When in Essai philosophique he considers the relation between war and probability, he does so within the framework of objective probability. Anticipating the concept that Simeon-Denis Poisson in 1837 would name the “law of large numbers,” Laplace claims that a striking regularity and order emerges out of a mass of individual occurrences, even if each individual occurrence gives the semblance of being random and irregular.130 Beneath the random causes that govern particular events lie constant and regular causes that become visible whenever a series is prolonged. Acting against a constant cause will provide only a temporary success: with time the constant cause will reassert itself. Laplace applies this thinking to empire understood as a geographical, political, and military entity: Consider the abyss of misfortune into which entire peoples are often tossed by the ambition and treachery of the leaders. It happens every time a major power drunk with the love of conquest aspires to universal domination; among the nations that have been unjustly attacked, the sentiment of independence produces a coalition that inevitably vanquishes the aggressor. Likewise, in the midst of the varying causes that extend or contract the different states: the natural limits, acting as constant causes, will prevail in the end. It is therefore of central importance for the stability as well as for the happiness of empires that they are not extended beyond those limits to which they are constantly brought back by the action of these causes; just as the waters of the ocean, stirred up by violent storms fall back into their basin because of gravity. This is once again a result of the calculation of probability, confirmed by numerous and fatal experiences.131

The geographical, political, and military limits of every country are decided by the operations of a number of constant causes. Extending an empire beyond these limits goes against the natural statistical regularity that will eventually reassert itself and thereby reveal the irregular and unnatural character of imperial ambitions. Publishing his essay only two years after Napoleon’s disastrous retreat from Moscow, Laplace, who had previously served under

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Napoleon as interior minister,132 now subjects empires to the law of large numbers and uses the Russian Campaign of 1812 as the most recent event in the data set to confirm his probability calculus. In addition to the changing coalitions against France, Napoleon’s imperial warfare taken as a whole faced the much more powerful enemy of the laws of nature now unveiled by probability theory. And this, for Laplace, was the ultimate cause of its failure.

The Medium of Action: Water, Atmosphere, Friction Clausewitz’s application of probability theory to warfare differs from that of Laplace in two important ways. Where the Laplacian analysis works within the framework of objective probability (in this particular example) and regards imperial warfare as a single, large event, Clausewitz operates within the framework of subjective probabilities and treats war as a manifold of innumerable individual contingent events. From Aristotle’s naval battle and Laplace’s improbable empire to Clausewitz’s theory of war, the number of future contingents has exploded. Whether political, material, or psychological, all elements of war are subjected to probability. But the complexity of the epistemic situation is further compounded by the impact of imponderabilities—of factors that defy calculation. One of the general concerns in the application of probability theory to the moral sciences was the instability of the object. In other words, was a given field regular and stable enough for probability theory to produce credible results? Laplace claimed that there were many unforeseen, hidden, or unacknowledged causes that influenced human affairs and that complicated the transfer of probability theory to the moral realm.133 In the realm of war the impact of these imponderabilities on the probability calculus was enormous. Clausewitz writes, “It becomes evident that the objective nature of war makes it into a probability calculus; now it only needs one more element to make it into a game, and this element it certainly does not lack: it is the element of chance. There is no human practice that is so constantly and so pervasively in touch with chance as war. With chance, however, the approximate and thereby luck come to play a major role.”134 In his famous trinity of warfare, chance figures alongside violence and politics as one of the three constituent elements of war.135 Chance is understood as the product of a limited point of view, of uncertain intelligence, of the ignorance of the enemy’s dispositions and intentions, and it constantly interferes with the plans that have been laid down. In a formulation reminiscent of Berenhorst, Clausewitz claims that war is “the realm of chance.”136 Yet his understanding of chance differs

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significantly from Berenhorst’s in two ways: first, it is dependent on a different conception of space, and second, it is included as a factor in the probability calculus. The different conception of space in Clausewitz becomes evident by the fact that he subsumes chance under the more general category of “friction,” a term he borrows from mechanics to describe the obstacles presented by the unforeseen and the accidental. But where in mechanics friction can be clearly located, in war it is omnipresent. One of the first times he uses the term is in his notes to the Vorlesungen über den Kleinen Krieg (Lectures on Partisan Warfare) held at the Military Academy in Berlin in 1810–1811.137 Speaking of the care that characterizes all operations in war, he compares this invisible but highly important element to a force of nature, “e.g. gravity, or friction etc., without whose existence the phenomena as we see them would be impossible.”138 As a ubiquitous force, friction not only affects all events; it is the invisible medium through which everything moves and in which all events take place. Manifest only through its effects, it forms a representational blind spot at the very center of warfare, and Clausewitz often resorts to metaphors to describe it: “Action in war is a movement in a resistant medium. Just as the most natural and simple movement, viz. walking, is difficult to perform in water with ease and precision, so it is difficult to obtain even mediocre results in war with normal efforts. This is why the genuine theorist acts like a swimming teacher who makes his students practice on land the movements that are necessary in the water and that therefore appear grotesque and exaggerated to those who do not think about swimming; and this is also the reason why theorists who have never been submerged or who have been unable to abstract anything from their experiences are impractical and even ridiculous, because they only teach what everyone is able to do—how to walk.”139 The space of war is a medium in the double sense that it is at once the condition of possibility for all military operations as well as the resistance that hinders it, the noise in the channel. The two-dimensional graphic war space of Vauban that was extended in the third dimension by the discourse on the terrain is here given another dimension. Space in Clausewitz’s theory departs from a purely Euclidean spatial model, or, rather, it fills it with a modality. In Clausewitz’s model, space has an “atmosphere.”140 This atmosphere consists of four elements—danger, physical exertion, uncertainty, and chance—which together constitute a “hindering element.”141 Danger appears as an emergent property, as the effect of the antagonistic structure of warfare, and while war never escapes its reach entirely,

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there are various levels or “densities of danger” (“Dichtigkeitsschichten der Gefahr”) that suff use the space of war.142 In such a space, however, the conventional language of military theory no longer applies. The eternal sunshine of Enlightenment military thought is transformed into a “crepuscular light . . . that often gives things an exaggerated appearance, a grotesque shape as if seen through fog or in moonshine.”143 Clausewitz describes a space in which the cloud, the moonshine, the half-light function as so many epistemic metaphors that dissolve the knowledge claims of eighteenth-century military thought into a haze of appearances.144 It would be a mistake to regard these descriptions as pure rhetoric. More than mere literary spice, these metaphors outline a change in the conception of the epistemic conditions of war. This is clear from his understanding of the actual weather. For just as danger ceases to be merely a physical threat, the weather is primarily regarded not as a meteorological phenomenon but, first and foremost, as an epistemic and praxeological one. Rain, fog, lightning, clouds, snow, heat, and cold coalesce into a meteorological resistant substance that complicates military operations:145 a sudden wind constitutes “a serious accident.”146 It is in such an environment that “the light of reason moves through different media, [and] is bent into different rays than during speculative contemplation.”147 Action in war is thus never “pure being.”148 It is inseparable from the modal state of space in which military operations are immersed. The concept of friction therefore forms a nexus between space and knowledge. Predicated on a modal conception of space, friction denotes the blind spot of the calculation, the mutable, unexpected elements that produce effects that cannot be predicted.149 Some scholars have tried to cast Clausewitz’s military theory as an early version of chaos theory.150 In this view warfare approximates a nonlinear system, in which there is no direct relationship between input and output such that micro causes can have macro effects. There is good evidence for this, for example when Clausewitz states that “the realm of possible events, the series of consequences that an action engenders, [is] infinite and the finite result of this entire calculation is therefore not attainable for the human understanding,”151 and when he speaks of the “almost monstrous differences that one and the same exertion of force effects in war.”152 Such volatility clearly complicates prediction, but Clausewitz’s turn to probability theory is precisely meant to counteract such difficulties. That war is pervaded by contingencies and that its operational logic often appears erratic are, to be sure, central and disturbing

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elements in Clausewitz’s theory of war. Unlike Berenhorst, however, who leaves everything to chance, Clausewitz tries to deal with such erratic behavior by subsuming it under the general system of probabilities. Even though chance is defined as “events that lie outside of our calculation,”153 Clausewitz suggests that it should be taken into consideration, insofar as it is given a certain “leeway.”154 In other words, the commander should “not expect a precision in the operations which is impossible because of the friction,”155 and he should plan his strategy accordingly. As an unknown and pervasive factor, friction thus enters the calculation and informs the military planning of the experienced commander. In the move from Berenhorst to Clausewitz, the empire of chance is transformed into a semicalculable phenomenon, into what Clausewitz at one point calls the “empire of the probabilities of chance.”156 War is utterly unpredictable only if one operates within an epistemic regime that demands certainty from deductions and axioms. From the point of view of probability theory, however, warfare can to some extent be managed, if only within a system of average probabilities. Clausewitz’s truly groundbreaking achievement within the thinking of war is to open the vast middle realm of knowledge between the equally misleading absolutes of certainty and randomness—a highly complex realm that is terrifically difficult to manage but that nevertheless displays patterns and regularities when viewed through a probabilistic lens. In spite of the many obstacles that hinder the seamless application of probability theory to psychological and practical phenomena, Clausewitz continues the general expansion of the realm of probability, as also advocated and practiced by Laplace, by extending it to the world of war. The modernity of Clausewitz, the move that marks a shift in the thinking of war and that connects him with the larger development of the modern world, is his double gesture: the systematic treatment of the impact of chance on the conception of war and, at the same time, his attempt to find a way to conceptualize, to navigate, and to manage a world of contingencies. One may say that in the military discourse around 1800, war gains a number of dimensions. The third dimension emerges in the form of the terrain and enters into a spatial economy where value is a function of time. Further, this space has a modal character: it is suff used by a viscous substance that fills the Euclidean vacuum. The state of war thus emerges as a general condition for all action and thought in which multiple singular accidents of both a topographical and an epistemic character dominate. Against Hobbes’s “rigide truth”

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and Pascal’s geometrical spirit, as well as against Prussian idealist philosophy, the various empirically minded military thinkers articulate a more worldly thought that seeks to avoid getting lost in the maze of absolute systems by attending to the actual conditions of the outside world. At the same time, this outward turn ushers in a new epistemic order where truth has little traction but where averages, hypothetical scenarios, and probable worlds proliferate. The dismissal of metaphysics and speculative idealist philosophy, however, does not entail a complete abandonment within military thought of the kind of transcendental inquiry initiated by Kant, for the analysis of the state of war is not intended merely as an academic exercise. It forms part of a pragmatic program that seeks to manage and control the increased complexity. As we shall see in the following chapter, a transcendental theory of the subject and its capacities therefore becomes indispensable. But against the background of war, the subject is reconfigured. Not an autonomous entity raised high above the hustle and bustle of the present, the military subject is conceived as a function of the state of war.

3

KL Modus Operandi On Touch, Tact, and Tactics

n the collection of Napoleonic bon mots that Balzac collected and published in 1838, the French emperor at one point states, “War is above all a matter of tact.”1 The pithy formulation compresses a whole discourse in philosophy, military theory, pedagogy, and literature into a single concept. What for Napoleon, or at least for Balzac’s Napoleon, is presented as a self-evident truth in need of no further explanation was the subject of a more detailed analysis in various fields that attempted to develop a kind of knowledge that could guide action. Clausewitz instituted probability as a conceptual paradigm for the state of war, but the transfer of probability theory from the realm of mathematics to that of warfare involves a number of transformations of its original form. The aim of the probabilistic calculation in mathematics was simply to determine a given probability, but in warfare the probabilistic calculation is only an expedient—an instrument that serves the ultimate purpose of action. Within military circles probability is therefore only intermediately epistemic. The ultimate question is how a complex epistemic field can be managed. In other words, theoretical knowledge needs to be transformed into practical knowledge, a form of know-how or procedural knowledge that makes thought operational.

I

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Here tact or the tact of judgment becomes essential. Derived from the sense of touch, tact serves as a mediating link between the mind and the world and is seen as particularly useful in situations where the world is in constant flux. Touch, tact, and tactics combine to produce an alternative epistemic model that recalibrates the makeup and operational mode of cognition. This chapter charts the discourse on tact around 1800 from Kant, who is the first to think of it in its modern sense, via Clausewitz, who rethinks it within a specifically military framework, to Heinrich von Kleist, who in his play The Prince of Homburg transforms conventional warfare into a struggle between opposing models of knowledge.

Kant: Fingertips and Logical Tact The first definition of tact in the sense that became prevalent around 1800 is found in Kant’s Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View) from 1798. As the title indicates, Kant puts forth a theory of the human being from a pragmatic as opposed to a physiological point of view. Where the latter examines what nature has made of human beings, the former aims at what human beings can make of themselves. Kant’s pragmatic anthropology assumes a “being who acts freely,” unconstrained by external circumstances and capable of self-improvement.2 He begins with an analysis of cognition and distinguishes between two kinds of people; the ones possessed of “common sense (sensus communis)” and the ones he names “people of science.”3 The latter are characterized by their ability to conceive of rules in abstracto before their application, while the former are skilled in the application of rules in concreto. The practical common sense is put into effect when decisions need to be made in empirical matters. For Kant concrete settings activate within the obscurity of the mind what he calls “logical tact,” with which “reflection presents the object from numerous different sides and produces a correct result, without being conscious of the acts that are going on inside the mind [Gemüt] during the process.”4 Directed immediately toward the object, tact, or logical tact, is an operative function that takes multiple points of view on the sensory input, weighs them against each other, and offers a single result. While the decision appears to emerge spontaneously, it is in fact the product of a mass of subconscious judgments. Due to its orientation directly toward the object and due to the hard work of the subconscious, logical tact, for Kant, is a superior means of reasoning in

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empirico-practical matters compared to the conscious, theoretical search for erudite and artificially constructed principles that can be applied to the given phenomenon. To each sphere its own: where speculative or theoretical knowledge requires a method of reasoning guided by scientific a priori principles, empirical matters require a method that is guided by the sensus communis whose operating principle is logical tact. This hidden faculty can be seen as the cognitive counterpart to the physical sense of touch that Kant describes in the section on the five senses. Kant ascribes the greatest importance to this sense. It is the first he lists of the three objective senses: touch (tactus) comes before vision (visus) and hearing (auditus). He claims that it is the only sense that offers immediate external perception, and therefore the sense of touch is “the most important and most reliably instructive.”5 Without it, it would be impossible to form a concept of the bodily shape of a given object. So with regard to the cognition of experience, Erfahrungskenntnis, both vision and hearing must originally be referred to the perception provided by the sense of touch. Since knowledge provided by the sense of touch differs in kind from the knowledge provided by vision, it is not sufficient to merely imagine touching an object. Knowledge through touch is the result of an action performed by the hand.6 Kant refers specifically to the sense of touch in the fingertips and not to the general sense of touch. In an earlier manuscript version of the lectures that forms the basis of the book, this distinction is emphasized: “When we therefore speak of tactus as an organ-sensation, then we mean the sense that runs through other senses, for the nerves are spread out underneath all of the skin. But the real tactus is in the fingertips, for here the nerves make small warts (papillae), and that produces a distinguished touch. This is the real tactus and the principal sense, for vision does not offer me a perception of things according to their corporeal character, but as soon as we have informed ourselves about things by touching them we are able to form a better concept about them.”7 The cardinal sense and the primary meaning of tactus is the fine touch of the fingertips. When Kant conceives of “logical tact,” then, it is as a cognitive touch that immediately provides the correct concept of an empirical object or the best solution to a practical problem. For Kant logical tact is not merely a heuristic means for reaching a quick decision, which may or may not be right. He states that it produces “a correct result.”8 As tactus offers immediate knowledge of the external world, so logical tact is the most reliable cognitive faculty for the judgment of practical issues because it, so to speak, grapples with the object deep inside the mind.

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Obscure Representations and Their Clear Limits Kant, however, sets strict limits to the power of the nonconscious operations of the mind. Leading into the concept of tact is a discussion of the problem of obscure representations, that is, ideas that we have but are not conscious of having. Within the mind the field of obscure representations is enormous, while the remaining representations, the clear ones, comprise only a few points among them, such that “only a few places are illuminated on the vast map of our mind.”9 Kant continues the cartographic metaphor and suggests that if only a higher being would exclaim “Let there be light!” over our mind, then half a world would appear before our eyes. To exemplify the vastness of the field of obscure representations in the human mind Kant offers a curious example: Imagine an organist who is improvising a fantasia with all ten fingers and both feet, while, at the same time, he is carrying on a conversation with someone standing next to him. In such a situation the piece will often be of such a high quality that the organist would wish he had been able to write it down in notational form. Yet, Kant continues, if he had attempted to sit down at his desk with quill in hand, he would have been unable to write down anything of the quality of the fantasias he could perform when improvising at the organ. Why? Because the host of obscure representations is activated only when the organist is playing without conscious effort. Kant specifically chooses the free fantasia as his example because it is a genre that developed free invention to the point where improvisation was central to the performance.10 Instead of playing a piece whose score sets the rules for the movement of the fingers and the feet, the organist must rely on the obscure representations that come to mind while he is playing. That he is carrying on a conversation while doing so only stresses the distracted or semiconscious state of mind he must be in in order for the obscure representations to appear and the improvisation to succeed maximally.11 The example is intended to demonstrate the richness of the field of obscure representations, but as with his subsequent discussion of tact, it also demonstrates the power of the nonconscious workings of the mind in certain settings. With the fingers on the keyboard and the feet on the pedals, the organist is immersed in the practical task of playing, and this praxis produces a better piece than he could devise from his conscious efforts at his desk, in spite of or precisely because of his “great diligence and effort” while writing.12 Kant, however, proceeds to dismiss the obscure representations from pragmatic anthro-

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pology. In spite of the fact that the better part of the human mind is made up of obscure representations, they make the human being into a passive entity, subject to the play of sensations, and he therefore relegates them to physiological anthropology. Kant’s improvising organist turns out to be an exception. As an outgrowth of the obscurity of the mind, the fantasia is a product that in any other context would be merely irrational. The successful, operational use of obscure representations that gives them a place within Kant’s pragmatic framework is only a rare occurrence in comparison to the number of times that we become their “plaything” and are led into inconsistencies.13 A similar critique pertains to the sensus communis and to tact. Kant is careful not to grant common sense too much power and warns against the exaltation of it at the expense of “well-reasoned science.”14 His coinage of the concept of tact serves the critical goal of limiting the claims of oracular wisdom that have been attributed to common sense. Further, tact is only one aspect of common sense. It also consists of experiences, “i.e. judgments that are continually proven by trial and success.”15 Such judgments that make up experience are not the result of subconscious operations but of the repeated interaction of the conscious mind with the empirical world. Through the active use and testing of our judgment, it is itself fine-tuned and adds to our experience. When Kant therefore sums up the ideal makeup of the mind, he stresses not the subconscious workings of tact but the conscious efforts of judgment: “A correct understanding, a trained judgment, and thorough reason constitute the entire range of intellectual cognition; especially if it is also judged as a skill for the promotion of the practical, i.e. for the promotion of purposes.”16 With the mapping of the extraconscious mind and the coinage of the concept of logical tact, Kant introduces as a counterpart to rational a priori knowledge a new form of praxis-oriented knowledge that engages the vast obscure field of the mind in order to solve empirical problems. At the same time, Kant remains somewhat skeptical of the positive uses of this part of the mind since the process of reasoning and deciding remains hidden and makes of the ‘I,’ who is ostensibly in charge, a passive epiphenomenon, a merely formal entity. In the end practiced conscious judgments constitute the most important mental capacity in Kant’s pragmatic anthropology.

Prediction and Patterns of Regularity The precarious status of logical tact in Kant’s system is emphasized by the development of what he regards as the most important ability in practical matters:

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the faculty of foresight. The ability to look into the future he regards as the necessary condition for all praxis and all human endeavors.17 Careful to distinguish “prediction” from spurious irrational or supernatural abilities such as “fortune-telling” and “prophesying,” Kant defines this empirical ability as “the expectation of similar cases (exspectatio casuum similium).”18 As such the faculty of foresight enables the planning of future actions with a high degree of accuracy. It does not, however, involve any rational consideration of cause and effect, “only the recollection of observed events as they usually follow one after the another, and repeated experience produces a skill in this regard.”19 The skill involved in predicting the future is of a different kind, however, from the one involved in logical tact. Where logical tact is activated only in medias res, that is, when there is an immediate connection between the subject and a given practical problem, the judgments involved in prediction are made at a temporal and physical distance from their objects. The success of the predictive skill relies not on direct contact and practical manipulation but on the projection into the future of a pattern that has been repeatedly observed. In other words, while prediction does not require a consideration of cause and effect and while repeated experience produces a skill, this skill is not equivalent to that of logical tact. Moreover for the prediction to succeed the patterns must concern phenomena with a high degree of regularity. Unstable phenomena such as the wind and the weather contain too many variables for the prediction to have any value. The only way to manage complex unstable phenomena, Kant claims, is to map out all possible eventualities using one’s understanding. In short, the skill is a rational operation, and it works only on stable phenomena. When faced with complexity and instability one must suspend the prediction and keep all possibilities open.20 With the exception of the weather, however, the world Kant envisions is not haunted by any such unstable phenomena. Rather the world in which his pragmatic subject lives and acts is one of thoroughgoing regularity and simplicity: the stable structure of civil society. In his well-known discussion of cosmopolitanism that concludes the Anthropology, Kant goes so far as to think of warfare as an element in the civilizing process and a step in the development of civil society. In spite of the atrocities and the barbarism of war, it is “nevertheless at the same time the mainspring of the transition from the crude state of nature to the civil state—like a mechanical device of Providence, where to be sure the clashing forces impair each other because of the friction, yet are

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kept going regularly for a long time through the push or pull of other springs.”21 In this view war is indeed a world unto itself, but only transitorily in the progression away from it. The pragmatic faculties and possibilities sketched out in the Anthropology are those required for a freely acting subject, unconstrained by external circumstances.

Kant’s Army In spite of the general assumption of a civil society in a state of peace, Kant does occasionally provide a brief description of the state of war and of the kind of knowledge it requires. In a section on timidity and bravery, that is, on reactions to danger, Kant uses a military example to illustrate fright. As opposed to timidity, which he regards as a habitual disposition, fright is “a state and an accidental disposition.” This temporary state is often the effect of a bodily cause, a physical indisposition, combined with the appearance of a suddenly arising danger.22 Kant imagines a general in his nightgown who is apprised of the unexpected approach of the enemy. The pang in the chest the general might feel upon receiving this news arises from the interruption of his sleep—the bodily cause—and the demand that he must handle a sudden immanent threat, the external cause.23 In Kant’s example war is the figure of the unexpected, of the interruption of the regular order of things by an event from outside the field of the anticipated. The means by which such a general might seek to manage the unexpected, however, is not physical training or preparation, but reason. “Courage” is for Kant a virtue that rests on principles, and by way of courage “reason then gives the resolute man the strength that nature sometimes denies him.”24 In spite of the fact that the state of war is here described as the unforeseen, as the unplanned, and in spite of the fact that it produces an affect that is physical in nature, the principles of reason function as a bulwark. On the other hand, Kant, in a rather bizarre passage, goes on to state that the rank-and-file soldiers prepare themselves best for battle by relieving themselves: “Those very sailors who at the call of battle hurry to the place where they can relieve themselves, are afterward the most courageous in battle.”25 That is, Kant distinguishes the members of the army according to their different methods of evoking courage: one as a purely rational function and one, quite literally, as a purely bodily function. This division is evident in one other instance where Kant reflects on war. Officers, who in their role as subordinates have been prescribed a rule of action, should not reflect on the rule using their reason. They should exercise

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their judgment only to determine what needs to be done in the concrete situation. A general, on the other hand, must make use of his reason because he has to judge all possible cases, and he has to conceive of the rules himself. Kant separates these two abilities sharply and quotes Voltaire to emphasize that different positions in the army involve different mental faculties: “Tel brille au second rang, qui s’éclipse au premier.”26 Without mentioning the private soldier directly, Kant argues in the same passage that a civil servant who is given specific orders need only be possessed of understanding. Since the private in the army fulfills much the same role, the different echelons of the army thus exemplify the major cognitive faculties: the private under specific orders needs only understanding (Verstand), the officer must exercise judgment (Urteilskraft), while the general must be possessed of reason (Vernunft).27 As war for Kant is subsumed under the teleological narrative of the transition from the state of nature to the state of civil society, so Kant’s army serves as the external material that makes visible the inner cognitive structures of the mind. While the state of war in the Anthropology is regarded in passing as the realm of the unexpected, the means with which it is managed are not the obscure representations or the workings of logical tact in the depths of the mind. Rather the unexpected is met with a conscious, rational recalibration of tactics. Of the different kinds of practical thinking that Kant develops, only the conscious aspect of common sense, namely the practice of judgment, is mentioned as pertinent to warfare. Since warfare remains a peripheral topic in his Anthropology, Kant does not offer a sustained analysis of it, and his pragmatic considerations remain tailored to the world in a state of peace in which his pragmatic subject can act and make decisions unconstrained by the impact of war. With Clausewitz, however, tact emerges as an essential skill to manage the state of war.

Clausewitz and the Tact of Judgment State of Mind Several years after the Prussian catastrophe in 1806, when Napoleon vanquished the combined forces of Prussia and Saxony at the battles of Jena and Auerstedt, Clausewitz looked back at a scene from a war council that brought together several of the most capable military minds of the age. The problem facing them was this: Would the enemy simply pass the Prussian troops, or would they seek to outmaneuver them in order to go on the attack? Karl Wilhelm

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Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, believed that they would pass by, while Colonel Scharnhorst thought they would attack. The duke, however, thought it would be too risky to let the enemy pass and then to set after him, but Colonel Scharnhorst regarded a subsequent attack as a necessary decision that would have to be made eventualiter, unless they decided to march immediately. General Pfull wrote a memoir suggesting that one should approach their depots. General Kalkreuth prophesied that they would lose all of Saxony, and both Hohenlohe and Massenbach believed that the enemy was on its way to Leipzig.28 In this morass of possibilities and uncertainties, the realm of future contingents thwarts any attempt at a rational deliberation that seeks to take into consideration all the eventualities presented by the situation. Clausewitz comments, “It is hard to imagine how many obsolete and withered operational ideas could still be voiced where our feeling should have swept us immediately to the goal. The question was not whether we were closer or further from his depots, not even whether we lost one or two of them, not whether we covered Saxony or not, but where and how we could endure and win a battle.”29 The uncertainty of the situation gives rise to a mass of hypothetical plans that only obscure the main objective. Instead one should rely on the immediate judgment of feeling. By negative example the scene illustrates one of the central concepts in Clausewitz’s theory of war: tact, or the tact of judgment. His understanding of the concept is clearly influenced by Kant, probably through the intermediary of Johann Gottfried Kiesewetter, a Kantian whose lectures Clausewitz attended at the Military School in Berlin between 1801 and 1803.30 As Clausewitz’s commentary makes clear, he distinguishes between two kinds of decision making: rational deliberation or “critical judgment” and subconscious, seemingly spontaneous judgment.31 In On War the opposition between the two methods of judging is made explicit: “Here the activity of the understanding leaves the field of rigorous science, i.e. logic and mathematics, and becomes, in the larger sense of the word, an art, i.e. the ability to find in a confused mass of elements and relations the ones that are most important and essential using one’s tact of judgment. This tact of judgment clearly consists in a more or less obscure comparison of all quantities and relations, whereby the distant and unimportant ones are disposed of more quickly and the immediate and most important ones found faster than would be possible using rigorous reasoning.”32 The passage recalls Kant’s Anthropology and also his Kritik der Urteilskreft (Critique of Judgment), where he distinguishes between

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determinative judgment, which subsumes particulars under a universal rule or law or principle that is already given, and reflective judgment, which seeks out a universal rule when only a particular is given. Clausewitz’s typology of the power of judgment bears a clear resemblance to the Kantian distinction. The rule-based, logical process of reasoning that Clausewitz describes seeks to subsume the particular tactical or strategic case under general principles of war. A judgment based on tact, on the other hand, lacks such principles and instead, in a reflective mode, seeks to find a rule to guide action in the morass of singular events and uncertain pieces of information. And the correspondence goes further, for, as Hartmut Böhme rightly points out, both thinkers regard genius, be it military or artistic, as the successful exercise of reflective judgment: genius does not follow the rules, it invents them.33 From the point of view of judgment, the successful military commander is indeed an artist. Clausewitz’s typology of judgment in military affairs nevertheless differs in several respects from that of Kant, for even as Kant states that the artistic genius is unaware of the inner mental processes that give rise to the new rules, he fails to give any account of these processes. Clausewitz’s judging war subject, on the other hand, is equipped with a much more elaborate and tremendously powerful subconscious. Not primarily concerned with the invention of universal rules and not managing a single problem or object, the tact of judgment is a fast subconscious operation of the mind that with lightning speed sorts through a field of infinitely small and manifold objects and quickly dismisses all unimportant noise. For Clausewitz tact is first and foremost a faculty that makes heuristic decisions that are immediately transformed into effective action in a concrete situation. Moreover tact is specifically conceived as the requisite cognitive faculty for managing a system of probabilities. Faced with a probabilistic complexity that neither Euler nor Newton would be able to handle, the commander must resort to the subconscious operations of the mind in order to perform the probability calculus. The subconscious here becomes a function where mathematics is transformed into action, where a potentially infinite calculation is made operative, and where future contingents are transformed into actual initiatives. In Clausewitz’s military anthropology, obscure representations are not excluded; they are engaged to solve problems that exceed the capabilities of the conscious mind.34 This applies to the strategic and tactical decisions preceding a battle or a campaign, but in particular to the decisions made on the battlefield. In the heat of the moment the “powers of feeling [die Gemütskräfte]” must be awoken to bring the mind into

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an “elevated state . . . if judgment is to make apposite decisions when it lacks an overview, lacks time, in the tempestuous rush of appearances.”35 In other words, with the world in a state of war, the mind that seeks to manage it must also enter a different state. With Clausewitz the subconscious becomes the functional analogue of war and tact the only faculty able to operate properly within the realm of probabilistic complexity. As in Kant’s diagnosis, the ‘I’ in such situations becomes a passive observer. Tact makes the decision and transmits it to the ‘I,’ who has no influence over the process. But far from generating fantastical impracticable scenarios, tact plays a central role in Clausewitz’s pragmatic anthropology because it offers the best solutions in complex practical affairs. As an analogue of the state of war, however, the tact of judgment does not necessarily provide a correct result as Kant thought of it in his Anthropology. In the short note “Political Calculation” from 1808, Clausewitz again distinguishes between the two alternative methods of decision making, but here conceived explicitly from the point of view of probability.36 The one method consists in thinking of all possibilities, including the less probable ones. As a consequence one gets lost in a “labyrinth of alternatives.” The other, however, immediately discards the less probable possibilities and is always guided by “the most probable case.” Since many alternatives are excluded and the most probable one does not necessarily occur, the one who follows this method might be mistaken, “but his mistake remains improbable.” This kind of judgment thus involves “a bold leap,” an epistemological leap of faith, since it relies on a “judgment without reason” and a strongly limited scope of alternatives where alternatives with a lesser probability might always turn out to come true. The product of tact is not a correct result, never truth, but always only a probable truth.37 As the title of his note indicates, Clausewitz extends tact to the political scene, and elsewhere he also speaks of the “practical grasp and tact of the statesman.”38 The connection between war and politics lies not only in the probabilistic conception of the respective fields but also in the practical urgency that characterizes both. The tact of judgment is specifically important in times of crisis, when time is of the essence.39 While the fallibilistic knowledge claim made by probability theorists matched the epistemic situation of war, the setting in which the probabilistic calculations were made differed starkly. The often abstract settings of the examples provided by Laplace contrast with the time constraints imposed by war. When drawing a ballot from

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an urn, it matters little whether the fictional philosophical subject would deliberate for ten hours before deciding on a ballot or whether he would reach in and pick one out almost instantaneously. In both war and politics, however, time is a limited resource, and Clausewitz’s development of the concept of the tact of judgment is intended to meet this temporal requirement. While the conscious calculation of all probabilities is a slow and cumbersome process, the judgment of tact is almost instantaneous. When circumstances thwart the possibility “to deliberate carefully,”40 tact instead decides in an instant, “im Augenblik [sic].”41 Paradoxically, reasonable action within a realm of contingency often comes about only when the urgency is so great that the mind is forced to switch from one faculty of reasoning to another, that is, when it abandons the conscious weighing of multiple possibilities and resorts to judgment by tact.42 In other words, tact is not just a method for making decisions when the process is constrained by uncertainty and by time, it is also activated by these constraints.

Staying in Touch Evidently Clausewitz conceives tact as a faculty that becomes operative in concrete circumstances; that is, it responds to the epistemic, temporal, and spatial limitations imposed on a situated individual. Since these constraints are present only in the concrete situation, the setting is of central importance. Inside a room away from the battlefield and outside of the element of war, one might think up a vast number of possible scenarios, but one is spared the influence of circumstances. Danger, exertion, and the thousands of blind alleys they present to judgment are left out. Only on the battlefield can their impact be felt. A person who reasons well in front of his desk is therefore completely lost if the same method of reasoning is transferred to the battlefield.43 Sound judgment arises in medias res, when the body is situated and in direct contact with all circumstances. It is, as Napoleon writes, a matter of “[la] connaissance de l’état des choses” (knowing the state of affairs).44 Like Kant in the Anthropology, Clausewitz stresses the haptic element of knowledge acquisition: tact is the “handhold of judgment,” the ability “to feel out truth.”45 As the mediating link between knowing and doing, tact is the third element that fills the gap by transforming the information provided by the senses into a practicable decision.46 And tact is the faculty that can effect this transformation because it is itself the fusion of a physical and a cognitive power. Half body, half mind, tact belongs to the category of things that, in Clausewitz’s

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words, are characterized by their “amphibian nature,” having at once a material and a cognitive aspect.47 Unlike Kant, however, Clausewitz develops tact specifically for the state of war. Faced with a high degree of complexity in constant flux, the soldier must be in as close contact as possible to the surrounding world. Clausewitz emphasizes the body and in particular the sense of touch in the hands because the state of war requires a direct and constant update of information that can be had only on the ground and because action is not simply a theoretical possibility but an operational necessity imposed by the enemy. When Clausewitz speaks of the practical sense and tact of the politician, it is not because he takes the state of peace as his point of departure.48 His famous dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means is not merely intended to make clear the dependency of military decisions and operations on the larger political game; it also points to the similarities between the conditions of the two fields: the probabilistic calculus, the constraints on time, the demand for action. And here Clausewitz does not think of war in terms of politics but vice versa. His point of departure is an analysis of the state of war, which he then projects back onto civil society: the state of war offers a good template to understand the conditions of politics. Only when Foucault in his lecture course Il faut défendre la société (Society Must Be Defended) at the Collège de France in 1975–76 inverts the motto and makes politics the continuation of war by other means is society analyzed in greater detail from a military point of view. To understand the political conditions in terms of the state of war, however, is an integral part of Clausewitz’s original analysis.49 As the ability to transform complex information into action, tact is the central skill in any situation where the conditions are similar to the state of war. It is, he writes, the “soul of action.”50

Modus Operandi The development of the concept of tact forms part of a larger meta-epistemological examination. Several sections of book 2 of On War are devoted to an analysis of the different requirements on knowledge in war. Clausewitz stresses two aspects. First, the mind of the soldier must be directed toward the things themselves (“auf die Dinge gerichtet”) such that knowledge is obtained through experience rather than theoretically. Second, all knowledge must undergo a transformation. In the words of a chapter headline: “Knowledge Must Become a Skill” (“Das Wissen muß ein Können werden”).51 This transformation is absolutely essential, and it consists in the complete assimilation of all elements

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of knowledge in the mind of the acting subject. In other words, knowledge must cease to be an object and instead become a subjective condition or a modus operandi, where it finds immediate expression in the actions of an individual: “The mental reaction, the ever changing shape of things mean that the actor must carry the entire mental apparatus of his knowledge inside, that he must be capable of producing the appropriate decision himself at every beat of his pulse wherever he happens to find himself. In other words, through this complete assimilation with his own mind and life, knowledge must transform itself into a genuine skill.”52 In this way the distinction between theory and praxis can be collapsed: action is assimilated theory.53 The emphasis on the practical aspect of knowledge in war leads to Clausewitz’s famous definition of war as an art rather than a science, for where science aims at knowledge for its own sake, art aims at the development of a skill.54 Clausewitz even claims that all knowledge includes such an element of art, not just in mathematics, where performing a calculation or using algebra involves a certain skill, but also in every instance of thought and perception because they involve judgments. Clausewitz goes out of his way to point out the impossibility of excluding art in this sense from knowledge at the most fundamental level in order to show the importance of understanding warfare as a phenomenon that implicates knowledge as know-how, that is, as an art, and that therefore requires a transformation of rational deliberation. Knowing must be transformed into know-how; thinking must become an integral part of doing. The concept of tact or the tact of judgment is Clausewitz’s concrete answer to the state of war, but it is also part of his attempt to effect a conceptual shift in the thinking of war: the state of war around 1800 requires a different state of mind and a different model of knowledge than what traditional epistemology can offer.

Kleist and the Drama of Knowledge Clausewitz’s theory of knowledge in its final and most explicit version was not published until after his death in 1831. Some twenty years earlier, however, it was anticipated by his fellow Prussian soldier and writer Heinrich von Kleist. The two moved in the same circles, and it is likely but not firmly established that they knew each other personally.55 But this is beside the point. Far more important than any actual acquaintance are their parallel lives and related ideas. In several ways they appear as each other’s doppelgänger:56 born only seven years apart, they both served in the Prussian Army, both experienced warfare first-

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hand, and following their active duty both spent the mature part of their lives writing on the relation between war and epistemology. In Kleist scholarship, however, a division of labor has obtained. On the one hand, warfare has been regarded from political and legal points of view;57 on the other hand, a host of scholars have examined the so-called Kant-Krise (Kant crisis) in an attempt to get at the philosophical underpinnings of Kleist’s work.58 Enlightening as many of these works are, they have largely left aside Kleist’s fascination with war as a problem of knowledge.59 In the discourse on war that emerges around 1800, however, Kleist stands out because his letters, essays, novellas, and dramas illustrate both the breakdown of one epistemic model, as well as the attempt to develop a superior one to replace it—the attempt, in other words, to wake up from his philosophical dreams and become unlost in the empirical world of war. Kleist’s last play, The Prince of Homburg, presents dramatically, in both senses of the word, these two models of managing the state of war by staging the clash between them. To clearly gauge their differences, however, let us first look at the structure of the original model, which was first formulated in 1799.

Life Strategies: Teleology without Time Kleist entered the Prussian Army at age fourteen in 1792; seven years later, in 1799, he applies for a discharge. Now he wants to devote himself to the world of knowledge. As reasons for the unusual decision to abandon a career in the military and return to the books he lists the harsh military discipline and his unwillingness to punish his subordinates. More than anything, however, he is driven by an ardent desire for Bildung,60 which, he claims, cannot be obtained within the military.61 He therefore decides to study theology, physics, mathematics, and philosophy. His mathematical study does not involve probability theory but covers several other areas: mixed arithmetic, geometric progression, and pure mathematics.62 He regards philosophy and mathematics as “the two pillars of all knowledge.”63 Toward the end of a letter that explains his reasons for his change of profession he writes: Remember that I regard it as my duty to take this step; and an accident, irrelevant circumstances can and must not hinder the performance of my duty, must not destroy a decision that has been conceived by the higher reason, must not upset a joy that is founded solely inside me. In this conviction I must confess that I await a joyous and happy future with some, indeed with great assurance. Completely content, oh! my friend, where can

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modus oper a ndi the lightning of destiny strike me, when I safeguard it close inside me. My heart increasingly supports and nurtures my decision, which I now will not give up for all the money in the world, and my reason confirms what my heart says and crowns it with the truth that it is in any case best to attach oneself as little as possible to the order of things in these turbulent times.64

Kleist constructs a sharp opposition between an empirical world whose operational principle is the contingent, unforeseeable, and unmanageable event and an internal world governed by the higher powers of reason that ensures certainty and a predictable and manageable future. Beyond any dissatisfaction with military discipline, his abandonment of the military stems from the experience of contingency that has left him with no secure foundation. In order to escape the mutable order of things he withdraws from the empirical world and seeks an epistemological foundation in the presumed fi xed order of science. The desire for Bildung is thus part of a larger quest for autonomy. Once a secure base has been found, it is supposed to function as a bulwark against the accidents of the empirical world. Instead of giving in to the whims of destiny and being reduced to a mere “plaything of chance,”65 one should take charge and guide and control destiny.66 A few months later he lays out his strategy in a letter to his sister Ulrike. Helmut Sembdner correctly regards the text less as a letter and more as a kind of treatise because it states programmatically Kleist’s newly minted ideas on decision making. The central idea is that of a “life strategy” or “life plan.” Rehearsing basic tenets of Enlightenment discourse, he writes that a free, thinking human being “decides according to his reason which happiness is the highest for him and with all his power he strives toward his goal on firmly established principles.”67 Reason and solid principles must form the basis for the projection of the plan; they must also cover one’s entire life span and have a single overarching goal. But Ulrike, he chides, not only forms desires and plans that diverge from the path that leads to the end goal; she has not even determined her goal. A life plan, he continues, is to a human being what an itinerary is to the traveler. It includes both the destination and the road to get there: “To embark on a journey without a travel plan means to expect that chance will lead us to the goal which we don’t know ourselves. To live without a life plan means to leave it to chance to make us happier than we ever imagined.”68 The advantage of such an itinerary for life is that it provides security and the ability to control the future. Without it, however, one exists in an undetermined “con-

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dition” or “state,” without direction or certainty—a mere marionette hanging from the strings of a random fate. The letter develops a strategic, rational model of decision making in which “obscure dispositions” are replaced by the “rule of reason.”69 In this model the future is a deduction from rational principles, for whatever the impact of external circumstances, the strength of the original principles guarantee that the life plan will prevail. With its unwavering goal, it is an explicitly teleological model, and yet time appears only negatively, as a disturbance that must be neutralized. Kleist’s life plan projects a future without time into a world in flux. In an essay penned the same year, he developed this model further. As can be gleaned from the title, Kleist seeks to specify his model of decision making: “Aufsatz, den sichern Weg des Glücks zu finden und ungestört—auch unter den grössten Drangsalen des Lebens—ihn zu geniessen!” (Essay on How to Find the Sure Path to Happiness and to Enjoy It Undisturbed—Also during the Greatest Tribulations of Life!). Addressed to his good friend and later director of the Military School in Berlin Otto August Rühle von Lilienstern, he states that the key to a decision lies in the correct judgment of the initial conditions. If an impossible effect is expected of a given cause, or if the initial causes themselves are not judged correctly, then the future cannot be planned with certainty and your expectations and your happiness will be deceived. The ultimate goal is therefore Bildung, understood as the ability to make correct judgments. In this conception, contingency is merely another name for an epistemic deficiency—the inability to properly judge the world’s fixed operating principles. Once they have been perceived clearly, it becomes possible to project practicable life plans as the logical development of initial conditions. Such a clear perception, however, requires practice. In May the following year Kleist therefore devises a series of exercises in proper reasoning for his fiancée Wilhelmine von Zenge. They are prefaced by a brief explication of their purpose: Frankfurt a. d. Oder, May 30, 1800 Dear Wilhelmine. Frequent practice in answering difficult questions is useful for our education [Bildung] in so many respects that it is worthwhile to take the matter just as seriously as it is and to teach you how to make appropriate decisions more easily. For solving such interesting assignments in writing, we practice not only our grammar and our style, but also the use of our higher cognitive powers.70

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Kleist proceeds to pose a problem, then he demonstrates how best to apply one’s mental faculties to reach the proper solution. The specific mental faculties that Wilhelmine must cultivate are those defined by Kant: the understanding, judgment, and reason. Presented with the somewhat bizarre question whether the husband or the wife would lose the most if one of them were to suffer a premature death, first the understanding will present the question clearly, then judgment will seek out the point of contention, and finally reason will reach a conclusion. This description of the three faculties is a clear echo of Kant’s Anthropology.71 But where Kant had also pointed to the importance of logical tact in practical matters, this faculty is absent in Kleist’s training plan. Focus is solely on the conscious part of the cognitive apparatus. Since the exercises are all imagined and transmitted in the form of writing, the concrete setting of the decision-making process is irrelevant for the solution. The cognitive drilling follows a sequential teleology from the understanding to judgment to reason without any time constraints. As the future in Kleist’s model of strategic decision making develops in a temporal void, so his exercises of the cognitive faculties assume the absence of time constraints in the thinking process itself. Planning and thinking are rational procedures that take place in a logical space exempt from the exigencies of the empirical world. Yet this model quickly comes under pressure. Kleist is increasingly assailed by doubts concerning his own life plan and finds himself at a crossroads, unsure which path to take.72 About six months after the thought exercises, he had still not been able to decide on a post. His passion for the sciences had cooled significantly, and he was now vacillating between various civil jobs. To force a decision he resolved to impose a time limit and locked himself in his room until he had made up his mind: “But eight days passed and in the end I had to leave the room undecided.”73 The model of decision making he had developed and even taught his fiancée failed utterly when he tried to lay down the strategy for his own life. The so-called Kant crisis that sets in a month later, in March 1801, merely provides the theoretical framework for a failure that had already taken place. Kleist’s encounter with Kantian philosophy and its claim to an ineliminable difference between the world of appearances and the world in itself only gave philosophical credence to his own skepticism toward the idea that science, truth, and Bildung constitute the ultimate purpose of life. As he had written a month before, “Knowledge cannot possibly be the highest—action is better than knowledge. But talent is formed in seclusion,

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character, however, only in the stream of the world. They are two entirely different goals, and two entirely different roads lead there.”74 Backtracking on the road of science and knowledge and venturing instead down the road of praxis, Kleist changes his views on decision making. No longer at home in logical space, he needs a new model for the empirical world, with all the demands and constraints that implies. Until 1801 he had subscribed to one model of decision making; the literary works written in the ten-year period from 1801 until his death in 1811 develop an alternative model. Here time and space are entirely reconfigured. More than the transcendental difference between Sein and Schein, what intrigues Kleist is how the empirical world operates as well as the possibilities for managing it. The state of war is integral to his understanding of decision making, as is evident in The Prince of Homburg, the play in which he presents his alternative model in the most striking fashion. Before we turn to the play, however, it is instructive to situate him in the larger intellectual landscape of German Romanticism, for even as Kleist’s abandonment of a purely rational mode of thought connects him to the disenchantment with reason and the exploration of alternative mental states that pervade the texts of the Romantics, his conception of war is fundamentally different from theirs. The perhaps quintessential text of Jena Romanticism, Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, features, however briefly, a theory of war. It is succinctly encapsulated in the protagonist’s statement that “war as such [ . . . ] seems to be a poetical effect.” Not unlike Hegel, Novalis imagines war as the expression of an underlying force, but he specifies its character as a poetical force. At a deeper level both warring armies are fighting for the same thing: they follow the “invisible banner” of “the romantic spirit” itself. The expression of a metaphysical entity, warfare plays a role in Novalis’s world picture similar to that of poetry, for the origin of poetry, he claims, lies in the desire to reveal in the world what lies outside of it. War and literature are therefore united by a common denominator: they both disclose a nobler, metaphysical force that governs things and guides the world toward greater harmony.75 As Martina Lüke has argued, Novalis’s Romantic idealism is emblematic of how the Romantics treated the wars that surrounded them. Whether the effect is the sacred, communal heroism that runs through the political war poems of Ernst Moritz Arndt, Theodor Körner, and Max von Schenkendorf, or the chivalric myths of Joseph von Eichendorff, war is with few exceptions the catalyst of harmonizing and escapist visions colored in various shades of Christian religiosity or poetical metaphysics.76 Against this background Kleist’s

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world-oriented and much more prosaic view of war stands out in sharp relief. The state of war and its implications for his alternative model of decision making form the main subject of The Prince of Homburg.

The Prince of Homburg Kleist’s last play has traditionally been read as a conflict between duty and feeling, between military discipline and individual freedom.77 Beneath these distinctions, however, one finds an elaborate interrogation of the state of war. Set in 1675 the play stages the historical Battle of Fehrbellin, in which Friedrich Wilhelm with the aid of Friedrich von Hessenhomburg defeated the Swedes under the command of Wolmar Wrangel. Written in the first decade of the nineteenth century against the background of the Napoleonic Wars, the play dramatizes the clash between two conceptions of the state of war and two models of managing it. As a drama of knowledge, The Prince of Homburg pits decision from rational deliberation against decision from tact. The opposing views are manifested, on the one hand, by Friedrich Wilhelm, Elector of Brandenburg and commander of the army, and, on the other hand, by Prince Friedrich Arthur von Homburg, general and commander of the cavalry. At the same time, the play rehearses a number of Romantic topoi. In the opening scene Homburg is sleepwalking in the garden, and in the final scene his incredulous question whether he is living in a dream is answered in the affirmative. The play seems to confirm Novalis’s statement that “the world becomes dream and the dream becomes world.”78 Yet even if the play is framed by Romantic motifs, Kleist puts them to use in an unconventional manner. The alternate mental states do not lead to distant, otherworldly realms; rather Kleist’s alternative model of decision making transforms them into a powerful resource for practical engagement with the empirical world and the efficient management of warfare. Three scenes are central: the laying down of the tactics, the battle itself, and the subsequent evaluation of it. Tactics The battle at Fehrbellin begins with an authorial setup. Gathered in a hall in the castle the leading officers of Friedrich Wilhelm’s army are given the Schlachtentwurf, the detailed battle plan that provides instructions for each of them concerning their individual part in the overall scheme.79 The plan is presented in written form, and the officers are required to copy their orders in writing. Field Marshal Dörfling reads a part, waits a while as the officer in

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question writes down the order, then continues to read the orders for the next officer. The coordinated action of the various individuals is to follow a precise sequential choreography, where the action of each officer is directly dependent on that of the others. Each element in the battle plan thus forms a necessary precondition for subsequent action and the unfolding of the planned sequence. Homburg’s orders follow this scheme. He is not allowed to attack under any circumstances “until the enemy, attacked by Hennings and Truchss, (pause) its left flank giving way and falling on its right, can only stagger backward to the marshes in whose ditches, we intend to see to it, those Swedes will find their watery graves.”80 To ensure that he does not attack prematurely, Homburg is ordered to wait until the elector has notified him through a messenger. Kleist here casts the elector’s tactics in the strategic mold he had adumbrated some ten years earlier. “On firmly established principles” the Prussian officers are to follow a predetermined sequence and disregard the impact of circumstances. The elector’s proxy reads aloud the “Essay on How to Find the Sure Path to Victory and to Enjoy It Undisturbed—Also during the Greatest Tribulations of War!” as a military analogue of the life plan. Here as well, the future is a teleological projection without time. Changing circumstances are only disturbances to be held at bay and managed by adherence to fixed principles. But already in this early scene, Kleist begins to undermine his old model. Parallel to the announcement of the battle plan, another action takes place that repeatedly interrupts the linear textual sequence. The elector’s daughter, Natalie, who in the opening scene of the play lost one of her gloves to Homburg as he was sleepwalking in the garden, is preparing to leave the premises for the duration of the battle. Given his earlier state of mind, Homburg is uncertain to whom the glove belongs, but now he sees Natalie looking for it. This secondary action is closely interwoven with the development of the battle plan. the prince of homburg: (to himself ) God! Can it be? (he produces the glove) field marshal: (reading from a paper in his hand ) Outside the range of cannon fire . . . (he continues) His highness, the Prince . . . the prince of homburg: She’s looking for the glove! (he looks back and forth from the glove to Natalie) field marshal: . . . shall not, until his highness expressly commands . . . goltz: (writing) . . . shall not until his highness expressly commands . . .

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modus oper a ndi field marshal: . . . no matter how the battle fares, move from his assigned position. the prince of homburg: Now! I must find out if it is hers. (He drops the glove together with his handkerchief, then picks up the handkerchief, leaving the glove in full view of the entire room.) field marshal: (annoyed) What is his highness doing? hohenzollern: (whispering) Arthur! the prince of homburg: Here!81

The detailed planning of events in the battle tactics is continually disturbed by unforeseen circumstances. Natalie serves as a figure of contingency that reduces the interrupted statements of the field marshal to meaningless fragments as the linguistic sequence is shattered. In spite of the fact that the planning takes place away from the war, in the hall of the castle, the process of planning itself is not spared the impact of circumstances. The many pauses in Field Marshal Dörfling’s announcements, as he waits for the officers to write down their orders, show the discrepancy between the present situation and the one on the battlefield: inside the castle these caesuras are free of charge; time is not a factor. But with the secondary action, Kleist injects the pressure of circumstances into this logical space. Natalie picks up her missing glove and departs, and Homburg is left standing “as if struck by lightning.”82 The secondary action is figured as an unforeseen event that breaks into the military plan from the outside.83 From this point on Homburg’s connection to the written medium has been disrupted. His mind concerned with Natalie, he merely pretends to write down the conditions that must be in place before he orders the attack. The spirit occupied elsewhere, only the letter of the law remains as a purely mechanical activity. The impact of the secondary action thus leaves a gap in the temporal sequence, and only the order to attack is recorded. Obliquely the scene presents the failure of a model of decision making that operates by a rational sequence in a logical space exempt of time.

In Medias Res The pivotal moment of the play showcases Kleist’s alternative. At the scene of battle Homburg suddenly sees victory within his grasp and decides to attack immediately, without waiting for the messenger from the elector. First, however, he must overcome the resistance of the older and more experienced Col-

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onel Kottwitz, who attempts to reason with Homburg and insists that they proceed according to the battle plan and wait for the order. The scene stages the clash of two different models of decision making.84 As the elector’s proxy, Kottwitz adheres to the model presented in Act I. Homburg’s reply, however, indicates that he is acting on the basis of a very different model: “Till we’re commanded! Oh, Kottwitz, does your horseman blood flow so slowly that it denies the orders of your heart?” In the tactical situation on the battlefield itself, Homburg senses instantly the relationship between the different parts of the complex situation and presses for immediate action. The spatiotemporal factors of decision making are here radically transformed. Only in situ on the battlefield can the development of the individual operations be judged, and time enters into the economy of the decision as an essential but limited resource. In Die Feldzüge von 1799 (The Campaigns of 1799) Clausewitz emphasizes that in tact “all the premises that in a logical development are pulled apart here have their effect as if they have been amalgamated.”85 Kleist pits such an immediate insight against the logical sequence of the battle plan whose missing link will arrive too late for the attack to be effective.86 A year earlier Kleist had published a brief text in the Berliner Abendblätter with the title “Von der Überlegung—Eine Paradoxe” (On Reflection—a Paradox). It consists of an instructive speech delivered by a father to his son on the advantages and disadvantages of thinking. The apparent paradox arises from the father’s insistence that thinking should take place not before a given task is to be performed but only afterward: “Let me tell you, the proper time for reflection is after the fact, not before. If it comes into play before or in the moment of decision itself: then it seems only to confuse and hinder and suppress the power that surges forth from the magnificent feelings [Gefühl ] and that is necessary for action; whereas afterward, when the deed is done, it may serve the purpose for which it was really given to us, namely to realize what went wrong in the process and to regulate the feelings for other situations in the future.”87 Conscious thought must be avoided during the action itself. It plays no productive role but serves only as a post hoc corrective measure. To understand something with one’s feelings or, as in the case of Homburg, vom Herzen, is to bypass the conscious faculties in order to transform immediate perception directly into action.88 Elsewhere Kleist refers to this entity as “das Gemüt” and further specifies it as follows: “We don’t know, it is only a certain state we are in that knows.”89 In the transcendental landscape around 1800, the concept of the Gemüt forms one of the most complex entities. According

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to Das Deutsche Wörterbuch by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, it was originally conceived in opposition to the body and long used synonymously with the Latin terms mens and animus. Later, however, it was differentiated by a number of finer distinctions. Kant, for example, writes in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason), “Our cognition springs from two main sources of the ‘Gemüt,’ namely sensibility and understanding.” Likewise Friedrich Schiller posits that the Gemüt comprises both sensibility and thought, and while sensibility is often emphasized against a one-eyed focus on the understanding, this does not mean that the Gemüt becomes a purely passive receptor of impressions. Rather it becomes a powerful source of action when engaged by the outer world. Thus in Schiller’s Wallenstein the Gemüt is activated in each of the soldiers in Wallenstein’s army when they are threatened by the enemy.90 In Kleist the Gemüt is defined in opposition to the higher cognitive powers, for it denotes an embodied mental faculty that operates below the level of consciousness. It depends on an immersion in the immediate situation such that the sense impressions activate the subconscious mechanism that processes the information and transforms it into action. At the end of Kleist’s text on the relation between thinking and doing, the father presents the solution to the paradox in military terms: “Someone who does not hold life tightly like a wrestler and with a thousand limbs senses and feels all the resistances, pressures, evasions and reactions in the whirl of the fight, will be unable to assert himself in a conversation; much less in a battle.”91 Kant’s mental Fingerspitzengefühl is here transformed into the full-bodied tactile perception of the wrestler and the soldier. And where Kant regarded logical tact as a useful skill but subservient to rational judgment and useful in few situations only, the military situation now provides the model for the relation between thought and action as such. Instead of projecting into the future fi xed plans that seek to keep the changing circumstances at bay, the successful individual relies on an embodied cognition in medias res, immersed in contingency and directed toward the immediate present. The battle scene in The Prince of Homburg dramatizes the exchange of one model of knowledge for another, the exchange of the teleological, timeless model based on the higher faculties for a modus operandi—a world-oriented model based on the subconscious processing of the situated body. This model arises as a direct response to the state of war, both in the play and outside of it. In 1807, in the midst of the War of the Fourth Coalition, Kleist had been arrested by the French forces in Berlin and sent to France as

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a prisoner of war. Writing from Châlons-sur-Marne to his cousin Marie von Kleist in June of that year, he describes his predicament: “And how long can this war still last, this miserable war, which might not even result in peace! What times are these. Given my reclusive lifestyle they have always thought I was isolated from the world, and yet no one is more intimately tied to it than I am. How bleak is the prospect that lies open for us. Distraction, and no longer conscious thought, is the state of mind that does me well. Where is the place in the world that one should strive to occupy, at a moment where everything is changing place in a confused movement.”92 The world Kleist experiences is one in flux, in which a multiplicity of contingent events thwarts any attempt to hold on to a fixed position. With everything subject to change, the proper method of action cannot be to stick to a fixed plan—be it a life plan or a military strategy—that the constant development of circumstances quickly makes obsolete. Kleist’s alternative method of handling the state of war requires individuals to immerse themselves in contingency, to be in direct contact with the empirical world in real time and make decisions as needed. Once the relative stability of civil society has been replaced by the state of war, Homburg’s sudden attack is not premature but the timely response to a mutable, unstable phenomenon. In 1809, when Kleist was working on the play, his good friend Rühle von Lilienstern published a book on contemporary warfare. In a section that deals with the importance of being attentive to changing circumstances, he invents a fictional battle that runs for a couple of pages. Before the imagined battle begins, the generals gather and agree on a battle plan that assigns each commanding officer a specific sphere of action and a specific role during the battle. They carefully run over the plan to ensure that all eventualities have been anticipated. On the day of battle, however, things turn out very differently. The general on the right flank seizes a sudden opportunity, leaves his position, and destroys the enemy. In the imagined battle none of the original dispositions were followed. Rühle writes, “Since circumstances in war cannot be calculated in advance with certainty, the general who follows the predetermined dispositions to the letter does not deserve the highest praise, whereas the general who has transgressed them to the greatest effect does.”93 Even if Rühle describes his imagined scenario as a coarse example, it may well have served Kleist as a blueprint, which he then worked into the much more elaborate example of The Prince of Homburg. Read as a drama of knowledge, the play’s central scene on the battlefield presents the final rejection of Kleist’s former Enlightenment worldview. Initially

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he believed that he might reason his way out of the philosophical predicament of the Kant-Krise: “The error does not lie in the heart but in the mind, and only the mind can resolve it.”94 Within the epistemic regime of large-scale war, however, Kleist abandons reason altogether. Instead the “obscure dispositions” that he had wished to supplant with the “rule of reason” are reinstated in their function as a practical tool to manage contingency. Kleist now offers a different account of the order of things and of the workings of the mind. Where Kant famously assumed that the regularities of the mind match the regularities of nature, Kleist claims that the contingency of war can be met successfully by the workings of the obscure part of the mind. The transcendental dilemma is now reframed as a practical problem of action. Relocating the cognitive aspect of the interface between mind and world from the conscious rational faculties to the subconscious operations of the embodied mind, Kleist gives the pure epistemology of Kant a physiological substrate. And this embodiment of knowledge is then extended because the tact of judgment displayed by Homburg is dependent on the full-bodied tactus of the situated individual. Kant’s assumption, in his own words, spans an “immense gulf ” (“[eine] unübersehbare Kluft”),95 but Kleist collapses the distance between subject and world through an immediate contact and constant exchange between the two, where the changing circumstances of the world continuously imprint themselves on the subject and modify it—just as the wrestler has his arms wrapped around life and senses the pressure, the movement, the reactions of its thousand limbs. Faced with the unstable, mutable phenomenon of war, one should not think about it, but touch it.96 In this shift to practice the criterion of truth is exchanged for that of success. What had earlier been for Kleist “the only goal” and purpose is dismissed as a poor criterion in a world governed by chance. Instead what matters is the ability to produce desirable effects, and they are achieved only if you are willing to work with the changing circumstances, not by disregarding them. Chance is thereby reevaluated and takes on a positive meaning. Not merely a disturbance, the accidental becomes the condition of all action. Homburg’s victorious quest illustrates that chance can open new possibilities that might in turn lead to successful action. In a commentary on the Seven Years’ War, Clausewitz writes a paragraph that reads like a gloss on the model of knowledge Kleist puts on display in The Prince of Homburg: “Whether the enemy’s incompetence sufficiently justifies the daring of Prince Heinrich can almost only be judged by its result, for this is one of the cases where the subjective and moral

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factors have such a preponderance over the objective and material ones that you can only say: the result must show whether the commander’s tact was correct.”97 The absolute truth that Kleist had hoped to find in mathematics or in physics gives way to a historical epistemology, an epistemology where truth is temporized within the local setting of a specific field of operations. Constantly subject to change, its value is measured by what works, by what in the end achieves the desired effect. The action on the battlefield is the centerpiece of Kleist’s theater of knowledge. Triumphantly and literally with great fanfare, the scene stages the dismissal of detailed, rational planning for an epistemic model based on action—a practical, operational knowledge suited for the state of war.

Metajudgments That Kleist constructed his play as a drama of knowledge, of alternative methods of reasoning and decision making, becomes increasingly evident in the aftermath of the scene on the battlefield. For the remainder of the play, that is, in the last two scenes of Act II as well as in Acts III, IV, and V, Homburg’s judgment on the battlefield itself becomes the subject of a legal judgment. By way of extended negotiations about Homburg’s actions, the play proceeds to offer a metareflection on decision making in which the process and the conditions of judging are shown to have a direct impact on the judgment itself. The negotiations begin with the imprisonment of Homburg. In spite of the victorious outcome of the battle, Homburg is court-martialed for not obeying orders and put in jail while he awaits his judgment. Fully expecting to be pardoned by the elector, Homburg is not in the least disturbed when he receives the news that the court-martial has handed down a death sentence. But instead of granting him a pardon, the elector asks for the document so he can sign it. Homburg’s incredulous response, “The judgment?—No! the text—?,”98 frames the extended metareflection. Where the fi rst judgment was the product of an embodied tact that led to immediate action, this judgment of the second order is given in writing and is the result of textual trafficking. In his function as guarantor of the law, the elector is repeatedly linked to papers, books, and documents. By writing and sending letters he dictates and transmits the law and also transmits the model by which the law operates, namely the exclusion of contingency: “I do not want a victory that’s a child of chance, a victory that falls into my lap like a bastard child; I must uphold the law, the mother of my crown, who will yet bear me a whole race of victories!”99 As

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indicated by the metaphor of descent, the law operates by necessity, by direct lineage. Chance falls outside of the law and must explicitly be excluded. The model inherent in the law is thus analogous to that underlying the battle plan as figured in the first scene by the dictation of the military orders. For the elector texts, tactics, and the law are different means of implementing the same underlying principle. This has important effects in Act IV. Homburg, at his wits’ end, begs for mercy, and the elector sends him a letter granting him a full pardon, on one condition: “My Prince of Homburg. When I placed you under arrest because of your all too premature attack, I believed that I was only doing my duty, and counted upon your approval. But if you believe that I have treated you unjustly, I beg you to let me know with two words, and I will return your sword immediately.”100 In other words, the letter asks Homburg to reconsider his action. But it takes a little while for the message to sink in. While Natalie urges him to write back immediately, Homburg takes his time and reads the letter over once more. He puts pen to paper, but he repeatedly breaks off to reflect further on the matter: “But what is he really saying in the letter.” Finally the light dawns: “He is calling on me to decide!”101 The scene presents a virtual replay of the battle, in which he once again must decide on the appropriate action. This time, however, the conditions have changed. Spatially translocated to a prison cell, Homburg has left the realm of contingency for its polar opposite: the regularity, rigidity, and stability of the space of law. And while the letter appears to grant full authority to Homburg, the medium itself imparts to Homburg the traditional model of reasoning sanctioned by the elector. This time, therefore, the process of decision making proceeds along very different lines. Homburg now reflects, ponders, speculates. Against Natalie’s exclamation “It’s urgent,”102 Homburg’s current method of deliberation emphasizes the disparity between the conditions of judgment in the two instances. Within the space of the law, circumstances have no effect, and Homburg takes as much time as he needs in order to reach a judgment. He even considers postponing it until the following day. With the shift of setting and the reintroduction of the written medium, the practical decision is exchanged for a theoretical one, and the faculty of judgment switches from tact to reason. As with his earlier judgment, Homburg’s second judgment, “It’s befitting for me to proceed as I ought to!,”103 is the direct product of the conditions of the decision-making process itself. As a metareflection on judgment, the third scene displays the interdependence of the conditions of

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judging on the judgment itself, but it also emphasizes that disparity between the order of the law and the state of war as well as the futility of the attempt to govern the latter through the dictates of the former. Valid only within the regular order of the law, but useless within the irregular order of warfare, Homburg’s self-censure only reinforces his original judgment by negative example.

Recruiting Allies The almost complete absence of the ostensible enemy in the play, the Swedes, shifts focus from one level to another: the historical material serves as a catalyst for the staging of a conceptual battle. Two notions of the state of war and two methods of reasoning and acting are played out against each other entirely within the ranks of the Prussian Army. But where the military battle is decided already in Act II, the drama of knowledge ends only with the fifth and last act. Homburg’s perception of war and action appears to have been defeated by his self-censure, but the last act presents the shifting allegiance within the Prussian Army from the old model to the new one. Bruno Latour has pointed to a key process in the development of knowledge that is relevant to Kleist’s play: the recruitment of allies. In his essay “Les ‘Vues’ de l’Esprit,” for example, Latour transposes a definition of victory from the realm of war, politics, and law to the sciences. Also in the world of science, he claims, the principle holds that the theory wins which “is capable of mustering the greatest number of faithful and disciplined allies.”104 In a superimposition of the fields of war and knowledge, Kleist’s play in Act V presents the active efforts to supplant the traditional conception of war and reasoning with that offered by Homburg through the recruitment of allies. The advocate and negotiator on behalf of the new conception is Colonel Kottwitz. He has authored a petition that disagrees with the judgment of the court-martial and that therefore calls on the elector to pardon Homburg. The petition itself has been circulated through the higher echelons of the army and signed by one hundred nobles.105 Receiving it the elector is quick to notice the large number of cosignatories: “A noble name, gentlemen, a name not unworthy of your support in such great numbers!”106 The army, which until this point operated in absentia as the elector’s instrument of power, here returns from the battlefield as a judging subject. The petition is therefore not merely, as one critic puts it, “a peaceful (because unanimous) protest.”107 With the petition the army challenges the legal process in its own medium: the text. Kottwitz, who played the role of the elector’s proxy on the battlefield, has shifted

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allegiance; now he, along with the one hundred soldiers whose support he has mobilized, functions as Homburg’s proxy. But why the defection? Having lost an ally, the elector wishes to know why: the elector: On the battlefield you did not hold this view. kottwitz: My opinion then was ill considered, my Lord. I should have peacefully submitted to the Prince, who understands the art of war quite well.108

The elector inadvertently points to the important shift: Kottwitz’s initial decision to wait for orders was taken on the battlefield, that is, in a situation in which tact is a superior means of making decisions. As in Von der Überlegung— Eine Paradoxe he has now had time to reflect on past events and sees that whereas he is not possessed of an intuitive insight into the functioning of warfare, Homburg is. The elector’s method of judging as well as his own should defer to that of Homburg. While his conscious efforts only interfered with Homburg’s immediate perception on the battlefield, he now uses it to clarify what was erroneous in order to regulate future behavior. In their discussion Kottwitz rehearses the advice on thinking that Kleist had penned less than a year earlier, a method he wishes to put into practice: “We have learned how to defeat the enemy and we cannot wait to exercise our skill again.”109 While the elector insists that victories must proceed from fi xed principles, Kottwitz argues that the new art of war depends on a shift in thinking away from origins toward effects: “Why should you care which rule defeats the enemy: if only he falls before you with all his banners? The rule that defeats the foe is the best rule of all!”110 To judge an action with the “law book in you hand” is to invert the proper method of judgment. It is literally backward. According to Kottwitz, actions should be measured by their results, not by the principles on which they are based.111 To act effectively in a given situation means restructuring the entire set of rules of behavior since the success of the action automatically instates it as a new principle of action. For Kottwitz and his allies Homburg’s action has already replaced the elector’s “doctrine”: “Let’s assume that you break the staff above the Prince’s head because of his unauthorized victory; and then tomorrow I would be wandering through the woods and cliff s like a shepherd with my squadrons and there I would stumble upon a chance to bring you a victory: By God, I’d be a scoundrel if I did not cheerfully repeat the Prince’s act.”112 In the contingent realm of war one should not shy away from chance occurrences but change plans accord-

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ingly. The yardstick with which to measure and evaluate individual efforts is success. To emphasize the futility of judging actions on their conformity to original principles, Hohenzollern allies himself with Kottwitz by casting into doubt the authorship and responsibility for Homburg’s alleged illegal action. A second letter to the elector presents a “proof ” that he, the elector, is himself the reason Homburg attacked prematurely.113 According to Hohenzollern, Homburg’s distraction during the dictation of the battle plan was the direct result of the joke the elector played on him in Act I. But rather than reasserting Homburg’s responsibility, the elector adds another influence on Homburg’s subsequent action, namely Hohenzollern. Had he not called the elector into the garden, he would never have participated in the joke: “Therefore I assert with equal right that the person who caused the Prince’s error was you yourself ! Oh, the Delphic wisdom of my officers!”114 While the effect of the action is clear, the origin and cause of it is lost in the nebulous sphere of possible influences. Hohenzollern’s intercession, however, concerns only mitigating circumstances in the specific case, but Kottwitz brings the argument into the heart of the law itself. The highest law, which must now be put into effect, claims Kottwitz, is that of the fatherland. This law is not determined by “the letter of your will,” that is, by the elector’s adherence to fi xed principles, but rather by the fortunes of the country.115 The highest principles of the law are results, outcomes, effects. The transgression of a rule is immediately annulled if the result proves beneficial to the country; then the transgression is transformed into law, into the new principle of action. Thus the law is subject to a potentially unending revision as successful actions continually replace existing laws. Kottwitz transfers Homburg’s model of decision making to the legal sphere. The criterion of principles is replaced by the criterion of effects. But the implementation of Kottwitz’s legal theory requires that the elector realize that he, as an embodiment of the country, must enact the change: revising the law and laying down new principles based on beneficial effects to the country is the task of the elector. In the end Kottwitz’s argument to judge by effects rather than by principles asks the elector to repeat within the legal sphere the action Homburg performed on the battlefield: by way of an unprescribed, groundless action, he is to effect a teleological suspension of the law. The legal mea sure that makes such a contingent action possible is the pardon. Within the legal sphere the pardon occupies a paradoxical position outside of the law. On the one hand, as Jacques Derrida notes, the pardon

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constitutes the absolute power of the sovereign and serves as a guarantee for the exercise of the law. In this sense it is the legal system’s transcendental principle that inscribes itself outside of the system proper in order to found it. On the other hand, however, the pardon is entirely foreign to the law. An exorbitant right, it serves to transcend and neutralize the law. The pardon is a “droit au-dessus du droit,” a law beyond the law.116 This is also how it has been conceived historically. Before 1800 the pardon was generally regarded as a necessary element in a legal system that was often faulty and unjust, yet at the same time the pardon itself was seen as an extralegal operation that usurped God’s role in human affairs.117 Kleist continues this tradition. Within the legal sphere of the play, the pardon constitutes the contingent action tout court. Offering no grounds of justification, it intervenes from the outside as a deus ex machina to suspend the law.118 When the elector therefore tears the death sentence to pieces, he not only annuls the model of decision making he has advocated throughout as well as the symbol of it—the written sentence—he does so by performing an action that follows the example set by Homburg on the battlefield.119 Responding to the changing circumstances in the epistemic conflict, the elector takes stock of the fact that the initial conditions no longer apply; having within a brief time span lost all his allies, he decides not to adhere to his original plan but instead to react to the new situation. The drama of knowledge reaches a conclusion when the last representative of the old model has switched allegiance to the new one and displays this fact by enacting it.120 The Prince of Homburg stages the triumph of a new conception of war and a new method of dealing with it; it also recapitulates the transition in Kleist’s own thinking. The assertive advocate of fi xed life plans ten years earlier gives way to an equally assertive criticism of them. His conception of the state of war and his response to it are closely aligned with that of Clausewitz, whose following brief passage forms a concise summary of the play: “The theory of the art of war writes no formulas, it is not a code of law compiled of pure dictates and prohibitions by whose paragraphs a commander can be judged as if by a Criminal Codex. It sticks to the bulk of military events, orders the given means accordingly, shows their relation to the purpose and leaves the decision to the tact of judgment and the impulse of courage.”121 Kleist’s play presents tact as the successful means of managing the state of war, but a number of ambiguities still linger. The teleological suspension of the law for the benefit of the fatherland is a highly dubious notion, particularly when it is transferred from the sphere of war to the legal realm. Moreover in Kleist’s military

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model of judgment, justified action is always arrogated. Everyone might now commit illegal acts in the expectation of a successful outcome that will rewrite the law and overwrite their transgression. If that does not pose much of a problem in Kant’s account of artistic genius, the stakes are raised considerably in warfare. If the aesthetic judgment fails, the result will merely be “original nonsense,” as Kant puts it.122 But if the military judgment fails, the consequences are dire. The epistemic concerns voiced by the elector therefore remain in place. Kleist acknowledges that judgment by tact is not based on certain knowledge, that it falls within a different epistemic regime. While Kottwitz claims that feeling (Empfindung) hits the mark ten times out of eleven,123 the elector offers a different statistic: “Well, judge for yourself, gentlemen. In the past year alone, the Prince of Homburg has cost me two of my most precious victories with his defiance and frivolity. And the third one he corrupted deeply. Now that he’s passed through the school of these days, would you be prepared to risk a fourth with him?”124 For Kleist too war is the realm of probability.125 The skill of a commander can be measured only by his average success rate and now the elector provides the numbers: Homburg’s success rate is a mere one in three. The play, as a singular occurrence, is revealed to be a statistical anomaly. Written into The Prince of Homburg are two additional plays, two unrealized ghost plays that accompany the actual one as a statistical nimbus. Kleist only hints at these virtual plays in which the course of events has taken a turn for the worse. But their virtual presence emphasizes that probabilistic knowledge and action based on probability rest on an inherent “nonknowledge” and lack an axiomatic foundation.126 Mathematics does not lay the foundation of certain knowledge that Kleist had coveted a decade earlier. Rather, in the form of probability theory, it removes certainty altogether. Nevertheless, in spite of the aporias inherent in the tact of judgment, aporias that the play never resolves but stages at their most intense collision, the realized play suggests that the epistemic gamble is well worth taking. While only representing a single occurrence, The Prince of Homburg can be read as the compression of future averages. Given enough future battles, Homburg’s model is claimed to provide a higher success rate. As Kottwitz says before they march into battle anew at the end of the play, with Homburg they have learned the new art of war, and now they are eager to practice it. The failures are expected to turn into the statistical anomaly as their successes increase. The existence of The Prince of Homburg is thus itself the product of probability. This play was realized, while the virtual ones were not because

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success rather than failure is the expected average outcome of future judgments by tact. Not offering certainty but evoking the probabilistic measure, the play itself constitutes an expected statistical average. Nach Innen geht der geheimnisvolle Weg—the mysterious way leads inward. That is one of the most basic of Romantic notions. What Novalis did not expect was what some people would eventually find there: not an eternal realm of light but a host of obscure sensations, patterns, and operations, a mechanism that could manage the impact of multiform impressions and transform them into immediate action. The transcendental inquiries of Kleist and Clausewitz are merely a necessary detour for a more powerful engagement with the outside world. One finds here the elements of a military anthropology that reconfigures the subject as a function of the state of war. In this view knowledge is not a rational proposition but an embodied condition, a state of mind capable of action. To handle the complexities of war, touch, tact, and tactics merge into a modus operandi. Over a hundred years later, the pragmatist John Dewey wrote in The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action that the true meaning of the Copernican revolution will not be revealed to us until we realize that “knowing consists in operations.”127 Already in the first decades of the nineteenth century, however, the philosophically inclined discourse on war was trying to make a similar case. But as is plainly evident from Kleist’s play, this epistemic model is so radically different from eighteenth-century military thought, from German speculative philosophy, and from traditional Romantic explorations of alternative mental states that it needs to be staged in a drama of its own.

4 KL

Exercising Judgment Technologies of Experience

he interest in operational knowledge was not limited to the fields of philosophy, military theory, and literature. As the logical extension of the attempts to delineate its basic features the question arose: How does one acquire operational knowledge, and, conversely, how does one teach it? Practical knowledge entered the curriculum of educational theory. Military pedagogy, however, differed from the contemporary developments in educational theory during the second half of the eighteenth century in that it was specifically tailored to the state of war. This created a fundamental problem, for how does one train a recruit without exposing him to the actual dangers of war? In other words, how does one train someone in a modus operandi for a specific condition in the absence of that condition? Around 1800 a number of different technologies were developed to meet the new demands of knowledge acquisition. In particular, maps, games, and texts were recalibrated to produce the state of war as a simulation in which individuals could train judgment virtually. In these artificial worlds the state of war appears as a product of poetics, for each formal decision in the design of a map, a game, or a text shapes the conception of the state of war. The Napoleonic Wars did not just effect a restructuring of these technologies; the state of war was itself an effect.

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It emerged as a second-order phenomenon, as the result of a map, a game, or a text. Such a reversal put a heavy explanatory charge on the concrete design of these technologies. After considering the new demands that the wars posed on education, in this chapter I examine the development of various technologies of experience that seek to generate actual experience by virtual means.

Exercising Judgment Routine As the director of the general staff in Berlin in 1819, Otto August Rühle von Lilienstern played an active role in the military development of his day. Later instituted as director of the Military Academy, he eventually rose to general inspector of the entire Militärerziehungs- und Bildungswesen (Institution for Military Education and Bildung), where he was in a key position to influence pedagogical methods.1 The basic tenets of the educational program he advocated can be found in his book Aufsätze über Gegenstände und Ereignisse aus dem Gebiete des Kriegswesens (Essays on Military Topics and Events).2 Underlying his views on education is a theory of the human being as a composite entity that consists of three parts: mind, body, and feeling, or, as he specifies, mind, body, and character. Accordingly the subject belongs to three different worlds: the intellectual, the physical, and the moral (psychological). Equally important, these parts must all be considered and developed in education, for all products of intellectual training, all conceptual knowledge, “only become force through character. Knowledge is in and of itself not a force, and therefore it also produces none. Knowledge takes on a character first and then it becomes useful as a motive for action.”3 While Rühle acknowledges the great developments in educational theory in the latter half of the eighteenth century, he claims that they have been based on a truncated conception of the individual in that one or another of these parts has been disregarded. In particular the practical aspect has been neglected because it has not been viewed as a kind of knowledge in its own right.4 The concept of Bildung has therefore been fundamentally misunderstood: For most people the word Bildung means only or primarily scientific education, because the greatest part of our educational institutions is really only concerned with teaching and inculcating a mass of facts and theories, and leaves everything that is not immediately a part of this educa-

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tion to those students who need further training for their subsistence or profession in the belief that routine or praxis will do the rest all by itself. [ . . . ] But is routine not also a form of knowledge? Is it not often a form of knowledge that has been acquired via detours, over a long period of time, at random, without your conscious awareness? A form of knowledge that is usually more readily at hand for the man of routine than science is for the theoretician because it has been absorbed through and in its application, and because the few things he knows have become second nature, so to speak, have been transformed into an instinctive skill through repeated mechanical use? And conversely, should all real knowledge not also be transformed into a kind of routine?5

Rühle articulates an epistemic theory in which routine, praxis, and procedural or operational knowledge are conceived as independent forms of knowledge. Praxis is not an ancillary element, a secondary phenomenon that falls outside the purview of pedagogy, but the very goal of education. It assimilates theoretical knowledge, makes it useful and efficient. The concept of Bildung, which Enlightenment thinkers such as Moses Mendelssohn and Christoph Martin Wieland had tethered to pedagogical aims and conceived as formal education, is here rethought as a process whereby the subject is shaped, literally imprinted (gebildet) by the object of study such that a practical skill is developed.6 It thereby activates all the parts of the tripartite subject: its intellectual capacities, its body, and its character. For Rühle the subject should not be conceived as an empty space that can be furnished with objects of knowledge but as a living force, a muscle that can be trained. Educational institutions should therefore become “bildungs institutions” in the above sense instead of merely “knowledge institutions.”7 Such a theory of knowledge entails a change of educational method. Not what a person learns, but how someone learns becomes essential. Practical knowledge is developed through repeated direct interaction with the object; whether characterized as second nature, routine, or habit, its development is based on practical exercises. In Rühle’s words, “All learning consists of constant practice, and a real skill, practical adeptness is the inevitable result, not theoretical knowledge.”8 The method consists of training, exercising, practicing. Rühle formulates an educational principle that is based on repetition in unfamiliar complex settings, and this principle is to be applied not just to the body but also to the character and the intellect. To obtain good judgment one must quite literally exercise it. Such mental training consists in the exposure

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to numerous different and complex objects whose structure, specific makeup, mutable states, and relations to other things must be determined.9 In other words, exercising judgment consists in exercising judgment.

Autodidactic Feedback Loops Rühle was not the only pedagogue at the time to speak of practical training. In 1802 Johann Friedrich Herbart published two lectures on educational method. Steering a middle ground between a theory that is too general and a praxis that is blind, he suggests that the key to education consists in the development of a mediating link between the two, namely “a certain tact.”10 For Herbart tact consists of a type of quick judgment and decision making that, on the one hand, does not always blindly proceed in the same way and, on the other hand, does not stringently follow a theory in the strict application of predetermined rules.11 Given its essential role in education, the question becomes how it is formed. His answer is twofold: theoretical instruction should prepare the individual for a given task, but it must not develop too elaborate plans, only rules of thumb that will not be thwarted by circumstances. Tact itself, however, is formed only during praxis: “It is by doing that you learn the art, that you acquire tact, skill, facility, dexterity.”12 Tact is thus the “sovereign of praxis” and also its product.13 Like Rühle, Herbart presents a circular method in which judgment is developed through judgment in a feedback loop, where the skill is constantly modified by its use. They both suggest that an element of autodidacticism should be incorporated into traditional instructional methods. And while the students must learn tact, the teachers must enter the “school of pedagogical tact”; that is, the teachers must learn that this subject cannot be taught in the traditional manner.14 As a mediating link between knowledge and student, the teacher is in danger of getting in the way of learning. Teachers can prepare students by providing them with rules of thumb, but the students must have direct access to numerous, concrete situations in order to exercise their judgment and develop practical knowledge. It is in order to successfully manage this precarious balance between instruction proper and autodidacticism that the teachers must themselves be possessed of tact. And this also is developed in praxis. When Herbart in 1809 became the second successor to Kant in Königberg after Krug departed for Leipzig, he made plans for a seminar in which pedagogical and philosophical lectures were combined with practical activity and subsequent self-evaluation.15 Teaching and learning thus follow a similar pattern: self-improvement comes through the exercise of

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judgment. Both students and teachers need to be gebildet in practical circumstances, and in this process instruction is inseparable from autodidacticism.

“I Hate Books” The focus on practical exercises in educational theory around the turn of the century is a new inflection of a general tendency among the leading educators during the second half of the eighteenth century. Rousseau’s statement “Je hais les livres” (I hate books) captures the trend.16 Instead of learning from books, the discourse on education turned toward operational knowledge and learning by doing. In Émile, ou De l’éducation (Emile, or On Education) from 1762 Rousseau writes, “Our first teachers of philosophy are our feet, our hands our eyes. [ . . . ] In order to learn how to think, we must exercise our limbs, our senses, our organs, which are the instruments of our mind.”17 The educational program he designs for his fictional student Émile designates the body as the primary element of learning, and Rousseau therefore mobilizes Émile and takes him off the school bench and out into the world in order to engage him in a number of practical exercises. To teach astronomy, for example, Rousseau takes Émile for a walk in the forest just north of their village, Montmorenci. After a while they stray from the path and quickly get lost. It is a hot day, and Émile breaks down in tears from fatigue and hunger. Rousseau, however, helps him realize that the direction of the shadows indicates the cardinal directions and can get them out of their predicament. Émile soon locates south, and when they reach Montmorenci he claps his hands and exclaims, “Astronomy is good for something after all.”18 Rousseau comments that had he been taught this abstractly inside his room, he would have forgotten it the next day.19 The question that drives Rousseau’s pedagogy, a question he never tires of emphasizing, is not what one can know but how one can learn to act. And action takes place not in the confines of a study but in the open space of the outside world. Rousseau propounds a theory of practice in which utility is the mot sacré since the evaluation of any knowledge claim is determined by its practical value. Rousseau’s focus on praxis was widely influential. The pedagogical principles of Johann Bernhard Basedow’s Philanthropinum, founded in Dessau in 1774, are based on Rousseau’s book, and later Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, the Swiss educator, also took his cue from Émile. As indicated by the title of one of his works, ABC der Anschauung (The ABC of Observation), Pestalozzi attempts to replace reading with what he calls “the art of observation” or

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figure 4.1 Pestalozzi’s grid. His students would train their perception of space by studying the internal proportions of the grid and absorbing it into their mental machinery so they could project its forms onto the world by themselves without the aid of the paper. From Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, ABC der Anschauung, oder AnschauungsLehre der Maßverhältnisse, Zweites Heft (Zürich: Heinrich Geßner, 1803), Table 3. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.

Anschauungskunst.20 The ability to adequately judge spatial forms he regards as the foundation of all knowledge. Whereas schools have turned pupils into “alphabet people” (Buchstabenmenschen) with “alphabet eyes” (Buchstabenaugen),21 Pestalozzi devises a number of exercises to train spatial perception and visual judgment. His method, however, differs somewhat from that of Rousseau. He uses a grid (Figure 4.1) whose internal proportions the students must learn. For example, the students should learn that the first square is divided

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by one line into two parts, the next by two lines into three parts and so on. The goal is for the student to absorb these forms into their mental machinery so they will project the grid onto the world without using the paper. For Pestalozzi the first task of education is to inculcate a visual frame into the eye to function as an ordered perception of space. To handle the world, the student must learn to impose forms upon it. These few examples should give a sense of the more practical and world-oriented turn of educational discourse before 1800. But how is the world conceived in these theories? As Pestalozzi’s imposition of forms suggests, it is a passive world of relative stability that is both managed and defined by a single individual. In Rousseau this is emphasized by the one book he recommends to Émile, Robinson Crusoe, for as in Defoe’s novel, the first part of Émile takes place as if on a desolate island in a space devoid of other human beings and interests. Accordingly the effects on this world of the arrival of the cannibals play no role in Rousseau’s reading of Defoe; they are simply left out. Moreover Rousseau frequently uses the vocabulary of fortification to describe his educational goal. As Joan DeJean puts it, Rousseau seeks to transform the child’s body into “a miniature armed camp.”22 When human affairs do appear in his educational theory, it is as the besieger of a child who has been fortified. The island and the enclosed, geometrically protected design of Vauban are the emblems of Rousseau’s pedagogical space.

Unenlightened Education While the educational theories developed in military circles around 1800 built on the theories from the second half of the eighteenth century, the changed conditions for action meant a rethinking of praxis against the background of the state of war. The space of action was no longer a relatively stable, predictable, and secure setting but, as Berenhorst had put it, an empire of chance. The pressing concern was therefore how one could learn to navigate this world, which kind of exercises could prepare an individual to cope with probability, contingency, and danger. The central trope in educational theory therefore shifted from the desk to the battlefield. Clausewitz, for example, wonders at the teachings of von Bülow and Jomini, at their attempts to present war as a science and one that can even be formalized, when “war itself was standing at the lectern, so to speak, and was daily giving practical lessons.”23 His own life is a case in point. Writing to his future wife, Marie, from Nancy, where he was held as a prisoner of war in 1807, he reflects on the education he himself had received: “Remember

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that I am a son of the military camp, but from the real world not from Schiller’s poetical world like Max Piccolomini. After a very mediocre education, my first experience was in the saps by Mainz when I was twelve—there I also joined in the cheer from the coarse cohort of soldiers when Mainz went up in flames. Thus left to circumstances, to the impact of the most varied events, and to my own feeble strength, I was raised by outer impressions, by circumstances, in short, by chance.”24 Raised by chance itself, Clausewitz transformed his own experience into an educational program. In order to manage the contingency of war, one must practice one’s judgment, and this skill is acquired “through war.”25 Or, as his contemporary Ludwig Freidrich Erck concludes in a handbook on the study of war, “War is the best school for the true art.”26 The substitution of the desk for the battlefield as the primary site of education is taken up by Kleist in his essay “Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden” (On the Gradual Production of Thought While Speaking). Dedicated to Rühle von Lilienstern, Kleist offers him seemingly paradoxical advice: If he wishes to reach the correct judgment on a given matter and he cannot do so by solitary meditation in front of his desk, he should seek out another person to talk to. But rather than asking the person what the correct judgment is, he should tell him. The clue to the paradox is the shift in the student-teacher relationship. Kleist expects Rühle to object that he was instructed early on to speak only of things he knows, “but then you were probably impertinent enough to speak in order to teach others, I however want you to speak with the sensible intention of teaching yourself. ”27 Whereas you can teach others only when you have the answer, you can teach yourself when you lack knowledge.28 Such autodidacticism, however, is dependent on the presence of an adversary in a contingent setting because what leads him to the correct judgment is interference, the unpredictable interference of the interlocutor. Trying to overcome the interlocutor’s attempt to interrupt, the feeling (Gemüt) is stimulated and then provides the answer.29 Affected by external forces, the speaker then behaves “like a great general under pressure,”30 whose instincts are activated by the unpredictable and mutable phenomena on the battlefield. Kleist maps the discourse on education onto the discourse on warfare. The speaker becomes a general who seeks to bring about the “annihilation of his opponent” with words that have morphed into bayonets. The quicker speaker therefore gains a tactical advantage because he “quasi leads more troops on to the field than his opponent.”31

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The analogy Kleist establishes between learning and knowledge production on the one hand and warfare on the other hand involves more than a simple correspondence of objects; it also extends to the epistemic conditions of the two fields. As with action in warfare, knowledge production takes place in a contingent, nonlinear realm in which micro events have macro effects. When, for example, Mirabeau on June 23, 1789, during the early stages of the French Revolution, dismissed the demand of the king’s emissary to dissolve the newly formed National Constituent Assembly, he did not, Kleist suspects, have his answer ready when he began the sentence, but in the heat of speaking he came across an apt response that annihilated his opponent. Kleist concludes, “Perhaps it was therefore ultimately the twitch of an upper lip or the ambiguous playing with a shirt cuff that caused the overthrow of the order of things.”32 Given the mass of future contingents and their complex interdependence, one cannot extrapolate from initial conditions. Kleist, however, turns this into a productive state of affairs for the creation of knowledge. As the general’s probabilistic calculus is predicated on nonknowledge and therefore always involves an element of gambling, the speaker should begin to speak “at a venture” and should do so with the conviction “that he will be able to create the necessary wealth of thought from circumstances and from the resulting stimulation of his feelings [Gemüt].”33 Contingency forms the tertium comparationis of war and knowledge production.34 To wage war successfully, to reach a correct judgment, to develop new knowledge one must not shy away from contingency but expose oneself to it. Learning happens in direct contact with the unexpected and the unforeseen, and one should therefore seek out or create circumstances analogous to the state of war. At the beginning of the essay Kleist contrasts this alternative educational program with a more conventional one. Sitting at his desk in the solitary world of rational deliberation and unable to think of the solution to a given problem, he writes, “I usually look into the light, as if into the brightest point, in an attempt that occupies my innermost being, viz. to enlighten myself.”35 Turning the Enlightenment into a wax candle, Kleist takes its metaphors literally and thereby fl ags the link that Enlightenment thought had established with educational theory.36 The affinity is clearly articulated in one of Kant’s last works, Über Pädagogik (On Pedagogy), published in 1803. Here Kant writes that “man can only become man through education.”37 The education of children thereby rehearses the Enlightenment project at a collective level.38 Educational

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improvements will bring every new generation “one step closer to the perfecting of human kind.”39 The method he advocates is this: “Man can either simply be broken in, trained, and mechanically taught, or he can be really enlightened. Horses and dogs are broken in, and you can also break in man [ . . . ] but it is of greater importance that they learn to think. For that is based on principles from which all action springs.”40 Kleist reverses this order of things: acting in a random setting, not following a fi xed principle, man learns to think. Where Kant advocates the education of the superior mental faculties and the development of universal principles, Kleist claims that this leads merely to “protracted brooding.”41 Kleist is thus a “pedagogical pessimist,” as has been suggested, only within an Enlightenment framework.42 But he becomes the advocate of a different type of pedagogy, a kind of sentimental education in which the feeling (Gemüt) is transformed into a practical, operative skill through repeated training. As indicated in “Von der Überlegung,” Kleist advocates a specifically unenlightened theory of education that turns off the lights in the chamber of reason in order to train instinctive, bodily reactions. Only afterward is the light turned back on as a corrective measure to recalibrate the feeling for its next action. Reason is thus relegated to a secondary, corrective role, while the feeling is transformed into a set of instinctive habits.43 The training of semiconscious habits differs markedly from the role habits play for both Kant and Rousseau. In Émile, “l’habitude” is simply a mark of laziness. In a footnote Rousseau makes clear that “the only habit that is useful for men is to subject themselves completely to reason. Any other habit is a vice.”44 Kant offers a similar view when he writes, “The more habits a human being has, the less free and independent he becomes. It is the same with man as with all other animals; whatever he has been accustomed to early in life always lingers as a certain disposition. Children, therefore, should not become accustomed to anything; one should not let any habits be formed in them.”45 In a nonlinear world, however, a world shaped by the experiences of the battlefield, not governed by the “order and beauty of the works of nature,”46 instinctive habits are deemed the most effective means with which to operate. But as Homburg’s two failed interventions on the battlefield demonstrate, their efficacy is not given; they need to be trained. That is why Kleist repeatedly maps the discourse on education onto that of war: training judgment, inculcating habits, and developing tact requires the direct exposure to contingency and subsequent self-monitoring in an autodidactic feedback loop.47 The goal

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of education thereby changes. Training, practice, and exercises are not the building blocks of a grand teleological scheme; they do not have the “perfecting of human kind” as a collective aim, even if this is only a regulatory and not a constitutive idea. Nor is there an individual teleology at work, as in Fichte’s idea from the first of his Reden an die Deutsche Nation (Addresses to the German Nation) that “all Bildung strives toward the production of a firm, definite, and lasting being, which no longer becomes, but is, and cannot be otherwise than what it is.”48 Rather the aim is a malleable subject, one that can quickly react to changing circumstances. Training should therefore not be understood as the physical analogue of learning by rote—we are far from the parade ground drills of Frederick II—for what is inculcated is not sameness but change. With each exposure to contingent events, the subject develops a sense for contingency, that is, the tact of judgment as it is manifested in a number of instinctive habits that are continually transformed and refined as they are exercised in unpredictable settings. Ever modifiable, the subject is a condition, a temporary manner of operating. Not an opus operatum but a modus operandi. Its education can therefore not be inscribed in a linear, teleological narrative with an ending. The training of the subject is a continuous practice, an Allmähliche Verfertigung, that never ends. Just as Erck, in the final paragraph of his handbook on the study of war, admonishes that the processing of the material that has been learned “as a preparation to become a war artist [ . . . ] naturally can never be regarded as finished,” so Kleist’s essay ends with a beginning: “(To Be Continued).”49

The Military Citizen As is evident from Kleist’s texts, the border between civil and military education at the time was highly permeable. As a result of the reform and reorganization of the Prussian Army that was undertaken by Stein, Hardenberg, Scharnhorst, and Gneisenau, among others, conscription modeled after the French levée en masse was officially adopted in 1808, even though it was only put into effect in 1813 and signed into law in 1814, when the campaigns’ need for manpower exceeded the number of soldiers available.50 This fusion of the military and the state that made all male citizens soldiers and vice versa extended to education as well. In Rühle’s words, “Arming the nation and educating the nation are two completely inseparable things.”51 Spurred on by the disastrous loss at Jena and Auerstedt, the reformers envisioned and in part implemented a pervasive militarization of the Prussian state and its educational system.

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Toward the end of 1807 the military reorganization committee composed a plan for the military organization of schools in which they expressed their wish that “the town schools would also be given a military orientation and would become a kind of preparatory school for corporals and officers (especially of the militia) without losing their current purpose. [ . . . ] The question might arise, if the matter is regarded as practicable, whether these schools would not accomplish everything required of a military education and of Bildung in general.”52 The last part of the sentence, “and of Bildung in general,” was added personally by Scharnhorst. The traditional view of Bildung was now refracted by military concerns. For Wilhelm Traugott Krug, the development of the educational system was the only way out of Prussia’s predicament after the French occupation. Krug suggests that the state, in danger of losing permanently not only its independence but also “its mindset, its customs, its law, and even its language,” should educate its way out of the danger. His treatise Der Staat und die Schule (The State and the School) from 1810 articulates the common idea at the time that the state needs educated subjects for its institutions and should therefore take charge of education, but it gives this project a more immediately military inflection: the “unfortunate division of civil society and the military” should be overcome and the system of conscription ought to be implemented as soon as possible.53 Five years later he goes a step further. In his essay “Abhandlung über die Nothwendigkeit des Studiums der Kriegswissenschaften auf teutschen Universitäten” (Treatise on the Necessity of the Study of the Military Sciences in German Universities) he advocates that the university become a true “studia universalis” and thus include military topics in its curriculum. Moreover, through the educational preparation for war, war itself takes on an educational function: “This field of study, by which war, which otherwise threatened to destroy all Bildung, is ennobled to a spiritual means of Bildung, is recommended more urgently than ever given the great events in recent times.”54 In other words, with the proper preparation war could be transformed from a destructive phenomenon into a pedagogical one. It would become an alternative means of providing the citizens of the state with Bildung. The directionality is thus reversed: education during peacetime forms the individual for war, but war itself forms the individual for civil society.55 This idea makes sense only if it is predicated on an at least rudimentary correlation between the state of war and the state of peace. In his lectures from 1811–1812 Rühle at one point pauses to frame his main objective: “Throughout

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the previous considerations we have endeavored to present war as the great school in which peoples are raised practically to sociable commerce and just association with one another, [to show] how a people must be raised to peace through war.”56 Like Krug, he believes that war trains individuals in skills that can be transferred to civil society. But Rühle explicitly extends the conditions of the state of war to civil society. The latter is cast as the analogue of war, as the continuation of the state of war in another setting: “If certain goals are determined, as they always are in the business of practical life and especially in military life, that require a whole sequence of linked actions to be achieved; the correct choice, progression, and combination in the application of the given means, the constant consideration of shifting circumstances, the ability to promptly seize the moment for the execution, a skilled and powerful manipulation of various tools and machines—then there is no doubt that a life or a profession, where similar conditions obtain, will make an unconditional demand for the complete education of all physical, intellectual, and moral forces.”57 The state of war, with its complexity, mutability, time constraints, and demand for action, becomes a model for civil society, the prism through which it is viewed. By its extreme nature, war reveals conditions of knowing and acting that have been disregarded by traditional educational theory but that apply equally well in civil society even if in an attenuated version. Given the hidden compatibility between the two fields, Rühle proceeds to map the discourse on war back onto the discourse on education. As “a large institution for the education of the nation,” the military provides a practical education that in addition to the intellect also trains the neglected parts of the individual, the body and the feeling or character, and that trains them to manage the contingent events of changing circumstances.58 Contingency thereby comes to occupy an important but problematic place in the educational theories refracted by military concerns, for if traditional instruction was unable to provide individuals with the skills, the habits, the tact of judgment necessary for war, if it could not be learned at the desk but only autodidactically on the battlefield, how does one train judgment in an environment where the consequences of failure are not fatal? In other words, how does one train the recruit without risking his life? Educational practice needed to develop a setting that could replicate the contingencies of war while excluding its dangers. Training in such a setting should then generate experience artificially. Around 1800 three different training devices were used, all of which relied on simulations: field exercises, games, and texts.

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Simulations In the Field The drills on the parade ground during the reign of Frederick II were exercises in order. Soldiers formed a segment of various mobile geometrical figures whose transformations they needed to execute swiftly and with precision. But as Berenhorst complained, such order, which even then he considered to be illusory, had become obsolete by the end of the century due to the changed nature of warfare. Instead of the “stiff automata” that reacted only to an order from above, soldiers were needed who could react to the contingent events they encountered.59 Yet the routine had not changed. After his first experiences of war at a young age, Clausewitz later observed the field exercises in Potsdam and Berlin and noted the disparity between the two phenomena. Nothing of what he saw being exercised had occurred in the actual campaigns: “The author’s most painful observation was that these mock attacks that had been discussed, carefully planned and rehearsed long in advance were conducted by the most distinguished men in the army such as Möllendorf and Rüchel, and this with a seriousness that absorbed life completely, with an enthusiasm that bordered on weakness.”60 Their exercises excluded precisely what Clausewitz had come to see as the defining features of war: probability, mutability, chance. Even the unpredictable impact of the enemy’s decisions was eliminated by the careful planning of the decisions and maneuvers of both parts. The soldiers were being trained, but not for war. The military exercises thus formed no exception to the general ideology of “Preußenthum” (Prussianness) that Clausewitz diagnosed as the main problem to be overcome. As he writes, all “impartial men who observed Prussia before and during the year 1806 concur that it succumbed to its own forms.”61 In the present case the disparity between the formal order of the exercises and the state of war was enormous and needed to be eliminated. Clausewitz therefore suggested exchanging the rehearsed maneuvers with exercises in friction. A central passage in On War articulates both the drawbacks and the necessity of such a training: No commander can give his army combat experience, and exercises in peacetime are a weak substitute; weak compared to the real thing, but not compared to an army whose exercises are based only on artificial mechanisms. To arrange the exercises in such a way that some of the elements of friction appear which train the judgment, the circumspection, even the

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resolution of the individual officers, is far more valuable than the inexperienced think. It is infinitely important that the soldier, whatever his rank, does not experience on the battlefield those elements of war that confound and confuse him when he encounters them for the first time; if he has met them just once before, then he is already somewhat familiar with them. This is true even of physical exertion. It must be exercised, not so much for the body to get used to it, but for the mind to get used to it. In war the recruit is apt to think that unusual hardship is the consequence of huge mistakes, miscalculations and confusion in the leadership, and he grows doubly depressed. This will not happen if he is well prepared by peacetime exercises.62

Only if the field exercises are infused with friction, that is, with all the unpredictable occurrences that lie outside the purview of calculation, is it possible to train the soldiers’ judgment and to heighten their awareness and mastery of contingent events. Only a substitute for the habits that arise through direct experience, and a poor one at that, such training is nevertheless an essential method to create effective habits in soldiers regardless of rank before they enter the battlefield.

Dynamics Clausewitz’s project of re-creating the state of war in as much detail as possible within a distinct, secure environment marks a step toward the transformation of field exercises into what we today would call a simulation. In what sense? The semantic cloud of the originally Latin word includes the following terms: similis, like; simulacrum, image, picture, phantasm, illusion; simulatus, represented; simulare, to represent, to copy, to feign; simulatio, dissimulation, appearance, deceit.63 The concept thus includes both an affirmation and a negation. A simulation is productive, but it produces something that does not exist.64 This inherent duality manifests itself in modern discussions of the concept where one might distinguish between two general tendencies. From Deleuze’s call in Logique du sens (The Logic of Sense) from 1969 to perform an “inversion of platonism” and its negative evaluation of reproductions, a line of thought is developed that Baudrillard later drives to its ne plus ultra in L’échange symbolique et la mort (Symbolic Exchange and Death) and in Simulacres et simulation (Simulacra and Simulation) in the late 1970s and early 1980s.65 Here the ontology inherent in the Platonic rejection of reproductions is reevaluated. Not a copy of the real, simulations are regarded as a constructed independent

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reality on par with the actual world. The conventional semiotic model breaks down: in the simulation the relation between signifier and signified is no longer one of reference because the simulation has no real-world correlate. Instead simulations are autoreferential, referring only to the reality that they themselves construct and constitute. For Baudrillard the copy thereby becomes indistinguishable from the original, and the difference between them collapses. Simulations obviate the difference between the sign and the real. This conception is predicated upon a relation of opposition between the simulation and the real. Both Plato’s critique of representations and the inversion of this critique using the example of simulations are predicated upon an ontological competition, namely the degree of reality that each of the two possesses.66 From Plato’s devaluation of representation as a faded copy of the real, the simulation, in Baudrillard’s hands, in the end out-reals the real and replaces it with the hyperreality of simulacra. The technological development that introduced the “era of simulations,”67 however, has also given rise to a different conception of simulations that bypasses the philosophical discussion on ontology, or at least relegates this aspect to a secondary role, for in computer science the real/unreal distinction yields to an operational definition of simulations. According to Paul F. Roth, a computer simulation is “the process of representing the dynamic behavior of a system by the behavior of another system.”68 A simulation is a knowledge tool, an instrument that provides insight into the workings of a given system through the construction of an operational analogy. The flight simulator is an often cited example. As Roth stresses, it is the functioning—the dynamic behavior—of the system that is the goal of making the model. The question of the ontological makeup of origin and model is less important than the temporal process that determines how the system operates. And while this process cannot be analyzed in situ, the simulation provides an artificial setting that makes such an analysis possible, while also allowing for manipulation and experimentation with the system. With sociologist Elena Esposito, one might say that such simulations constitute a “doubling of reality” that does not seek to compete with, surpass, or replace reality but that makes it manageable. It offers ways of orienting oneself in the world and coping with it. Simulations have real consequences because the effects of the simulation result in actual transformations of reality.69 The competitive relationship between simulation and reality is here replaced by cooperation and dependency. Following this

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line of thought, simulations are virtual tools for the management of real complexity.70 For Clausewitz the field exercises he witnessed in Potsdam and in Berlin were deficient precisely because they did not mimic the dynamic behavior of war. The temporal process, which in war generates contingent events en masse, had been replaced by an abstract pseudo-temporality, the mere semblance of time in the execution of the preconceived and preprogrammed tactical schemes laid down in advance and carried out to the letter. The success criterion of such exercises—that everything goes according to plan—replicated the ideal of warfare but not its reality. Central to the dynamic behavior of the system of war is the ubiquitous impact of friction, and Clausewitz’s introduction of contingencies into the field exercises thus seeks to create a separate model of war in which its actual operative character could be modeled. His goal is to transform a temporal exercise into an effective simulation—effective because it has real-world consequences. Immersed in the contingent sphere of the simulation, the soldiers develop habits they can bring with them to the actual battlefield. Thus for Clausewitz the primary function of the simulation is educational. The tact of judgment is first and foremost a product of Übung, an exercise that makes “the discovery of truth, i.e. the correct judgment, almost into a habit.”71 It is just such habits that Clausewitz’s imagined simulation is intended to train. As a pedagogical tool, however, this type of simulation has a clear drawback: impracticality. While, as Erck writes, a field exercise “is closest to the image of actual war,” the material and logistical demands are most often too great for an exercise that replicates the size and complexity of modern warfare to be carried out.72 In other words, the exercises would still fall short of a proper simulation of the state of war. With the soldiers out in an actual field, the scale of the simulation both needed to approach 1:1 in order to replicate the complexity of war and could not reach this scale because it was practically impossible. Where Uncle Toby’s siege model is undermined by its symbolic surfeit when the model grows out of proportion and encroaches upon the real, the efficacy of the field exercises is undermined by their symbolic deficiency: simulating a dynamic process in the real, the field exercises are unrealistic insofar as they fall short of replicating the full extent of the contingencies of the Napoleonic Wars. Erck therefore suggests reducing the dependency on the real by transposing a part of it onto the imaginative plane: going out

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on an actual terrain, one should establish a tactical goal and then seek to imagine “all possible situations” that might develop in this location.73 The extensive space of war and the multiplicity of contingent events are now replicated in extenso by the mind. But this leads to other problems. The game-theoretical aspect of war, its reciprocal action, which had come to be regarded as one of the main causes of unpredictability, is ignored. Other methods, other models were required that could maximize the similarity between the dynamic process in the training device and in the state of war. But Erck’s half-real, half-imaginative suggestion is only an intermediate model in the transition from the real to the symbolic, for “on maps that have been projected faithfully to nature, one can undertake to solve such tactical tasks.”74 Around 1800 media offered a solution to the problem of learning how to manage space and contingency. When the exercising soldier could not be sent to a battlefield of sufficient proportions and complexity, the battlefield was brought to the soldier.

War in the Living Room: Maps, Dice, Games “The only difference between games and knowledge is their use.” In two brief entries on the game of chess, Wittgenstein imagines a hypothetical scenario: What if people on Mars wage war like we play chess? What if they fight each other on a meadow formed like a chessboard? If that were indeed the case, then the general staff would be as concerned with chess as they now are with the topographical map.75 Wittgenstein’s thought experiment develops against the background of a material history, for the period between 1770 and 1830 marks the emergence of a number of increasingly intricate and sophisticated devices that sought to simulate the state of war: war games or, in Prussian parlance, Kriegsspiele.76 This development was directly dependent on the revolution in cartography that took place during the same period. A fuller description of the cartographic apparatus that was born out of the Napoleonic Wars is given in Chapter 5; of interest here is the use of maps in educational practice and their impact on the design of simulating devices. The first war game to gain wider currency, and the one that forms the basis of Montbrison’s and Uncle Toby’s topographical chess, was invented by Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig (1743–1831) in 1780 and published with the title Versuch eines aufs Schachspiel gebaueten taktischen Spiels von zwey und mehreren Personen zu spielen (Attempt at a Tactical Game Based on Chess to Be Played by Two or More Persons).77 As the title indicates, it marks the begin-

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ning of the transition from the strictures of chess to the complex workings of war games with an educational purpose—in other words, the gradual transformation of a game into a simulation.78 Hellwig explicitly distances himself from the abstract space of chess, in which all squares are equally traversable with nothing resembling an obstacle standing in the way: “In short, this surface is a parade ground and not a theater of war.”79 Instead his tactical game takes place on a map of a concrete terrain that consists of two kinds of obstacles represented by different colors (Figure 4.2). One color indicates mountains that cannot be passed, while the other indicates swamps and marshes that also hinder the movement of soldiers but not firepower.80 Differentiating between two kinds of obstacles and three kinds of terrain, Hellwig adds another dimension to the two-dimensional plane and thereby transforms it into a three-dimensional terrain. He further expands the field of possible operations by increasing the size of the board from 64 to 1,617 squares and even suggests a more complex game to be played on a board of 2,640 squares that takes into consideration smaller elevations of the terrain as well as the provisions for the troops.81 In Hellwig’s war game one of the main difficulties of the genre becomes evident. While the games increasingly strive toward greater realism and a higher degree of complexity, they simultaneously become increasingly unplayable. Ten years earlier an anonymous inventor (M. M.) published Le Jeu de la guerre, ou raffinement du jeu des echecs (The War Game or a Refined Version of the Game of Chess). The less than radical changes he suggested, for example expanding the chess board to 121 squares (Figure 4.3), allowed for a complete explanation of the game in a small, large-print seventy-five-page bilingual volume.82 Hellwig’s densely written manual of some two hundred pages, however, requires intensive study, and he estimates that merely setting up the tactical game takes about one and a half hours. The limitation of the media simulation lies in the trade-off between the game’s degree of realism and its playability. The more the game approaches the complexity of actual war, the more difficult it becomes to find one’s way in the mountains of rules that organize the game. As Hellwig writes in the second edition from 1803, “If this game is also to serve an educational purpose, if it is to be generally useful and not just for the cleverest minds, then there cannot be as many elements in the game as there are elements in the original. A war game will therefore approach perfection when it only represents the most important elements to the senses and does so in the simplest manner possible.”83 Hellwig dreams of the realism that would

The board for Hellwig’s war game. Unlike earlier games that were played on the uniform, abstract space of a chess-like board, the basis of Hellwig’s game is a differentiated terrain that either hinders or affords movement. From Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig, Versuch eines aufs Schachspiel gebaueten taktischen Spiels von zwey und mehreren Personen zu Spielen (Leipzig: Siegfried Lebrecht Crusius, 1780). Forsvarets Bibliotek. Courtesy of Suzanne Reitz at Fotografisk Atelier.

figure 4.2

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figure 4.3 The board for an anonymous war game published in 1770. As indicated by the title and layout of the board, the war game was still an only slightly expanded version of the game of chess. From Le Jeu de la guerre, ou raffinement du jeu des echecs / Neues Kriegsspiel, oder: verbessertes Schachspiel (Prague: chez François Augustin Hoechenberger, 1770). Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.

come with a board sixteen times larger than the one he describes, but the simplification in his game is not all that problematic since its educational purpose is to visualize a restricted number of basic rules or “truths of [the] art of war.”84 In the second edition he lists a number of such rules, “whose truth is confirmed by the game.”85 The purpose of the game is not primarily to train

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judgment nor to manage contingency but rather to make clear, to make visually manifest certain positive rules and theoretical principles that are given beforehand. In other words, Hellwig’s tactical game is illustrative: it offers a visual illustration of accepted military theory. While Hellwig’s game seeks to break with the norms of chess, its operative dynamics nevertheless remain those staked out by chess. Chance and uncertainty are not an integrated part of the game, and causes are smoothly and necessarily transformed into the intended and predictable effects.86 As a visual illustration of theoretical principles, the purpose of the game would be thwarted by the introduction of contingencies. Reflecting on his motivation behind the invention of the game in 1780, Hellwig writes that the value of the game lies in its ability “to illustrate some of the rules of the art of war and thereby to be useful for the student of this art. A secondary objective was to offer pleasant entertainment to those who do not need such education, and where nothing depends on chance, but everything on the decisions of the player.”87 In spite of its explicit exclusion of chance, the game does in some measure train the players to handle the unexpected, for while Hellwig is unable to offer any rules as to how one best plays the game—apart from well-known and trite truths of the art of war—he thinks that it will become clear from the playing of the game: “Experience will teach it to everyone.”88 In addition to illustrating military theory, the game thus offers some practical training that artificially generates actual experience in the operational use and application of tactical principles. Yet in Hellwig’s instructions the development of experience enters the picture only as a remedy that compensates for the absence of rules that govern praxis. It fills an unfortunate lacuna in the regulations of the game, but as such it is merely a catalyst that will allow the game to progress and facilitate the manifestation of the military principles.

Artificial Experience With the Napoleonic Wars, war games enter a new phase. The entertainment aspect of the game is relegated to a secondary role, giving way to its potential as a training device. Georg Venturini, in his Beschreibung und Regeln eines neuen Krieges-Spiels, zum Nutzen und Vergnügen, besonders aber zum Gebrauch in Militair-Schulen (Description and Rules of a New War Game, for Usefulness and Enjoyment, but Particularly for Use in Military Schools) from 1797, states clearly that war games constitute the best means “to teach young soldiers the often difficult doctrines of the art of war as if through experience.”89 War games

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afford such virtual experience through the change of scale because in the game it is possible “to get an overview of the connections, the causes and effects of the great events of war in a single glance, and through the experience on the small scale [im kleinen] to derive the possible consequences of the first causes also on the great scene of the world.”90 The game follows the principle “scale down to scale up,” where the game itself constitutes only an intermediary step that generates experience that can subsequently be applied in a 1:1-scale real-world setting. Because of this primary educational aspect, in his second version of the game, Darstellung eines neuen Kriegsspiels zum Gebrauch für Offiziere und in Militärschulen (Demonstration of a New War Game for Officers and for Use in Military Schools) from 1804, Venturini is wary of even using the term game about his new invention. Lacking better options, he calls it a “Commander’s Game” (Feldherrenspiel), which, however, “as will soon become evident from playing it, really ought not to be described as a game.”91 Realizing these games’ potential as a training device, the inventors grappled with the problem of how to create the optimal media replica of the nature and dynamics of war as it was happening around them. Where thinkers such as Berenhorst and Clausewitz sought to describe the state of war in the form it had taken around 1800, it was the task of inventors such as Hellwig, Venturini, Allgaier, Chamblanc, Opiz, and Reißwitz to create it, to produce artificially the nature and dynamics of large-scale war in a separate simulated world: the war game.92 Venturini claimed that he spent four years of uninterrupted work devising his first game and that the perfecting of it that resulted in his second version was the product of an “almost endless exertion”; such work testifies, if not to his actual effort, at least to the high degree of complexity of the rules that were necessary for the game to offer a realistic simulation of the state of war around 1800.93 In particular two elements in Hellwig’s game were developed further in the optimization of the war games: the representation of space and the epistemic regime that governs the operative dynamics of the game. The first of these two was developed by Venturini. He expanded the board to 3,600 squares and incorporated a more finely differentiated terrain with a greater number of obstacles. Gray, brown, green, black, and striped squares of different colors mark the different heights of mountains, swamps, forests, rivers, and other features (Figure 4.4). The importance of the terrain for Venturini’s game is evident in his extensive four-volume work on military geography, Lehrbuch der Militair-Geographie der östlichen Länder am Niederrhein (Textbook on the Military Geography of

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figure 4.4 The board for Venturini’s war game. As is evident from the more finely differentiated color scheme, the topographical differences of the terrain have gradually gained in significance. From Georg Venturini, Beschreibung und Regeln eines neuen Krieges-Spiels, zum Nutzen und Vergnügen, besonders aber zum Gebrauch in Militair-Schulen (Schleswig: bey J. G. Röhß, 1797). Forsvarets Bibliotek.

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the Eastern Territories by the Lower Rhine) from 1804, a work that consists exclusively of detailed descriptions of the terrain from a tactical point of view. The book defines the art of war as “the superior use of terrain advantages.”94 For Venturini it is therefore essential that the game replicates the character of the actual terrain as far as possible. His focus on spatial realism is emphasized by the fact that his board represents not just any stretch of land but the contested space of the border between France and Belgium.95 The real innovation, however, lies elsewhere: Venturini suggests that instead of a constructed board, one could use accurate maps.96 The development in the representation of the space of war, however, was not accompanied by an equally original innovation in the representation of its operative dynamics. As in Hellwig’s game, the progression of the play is structured solely by the will of the players, whereas phenomena that lie outside the purview of the commanding general are excluded, for example “the bravery of the troops, treason or the accidental advantage of favorable weather conditions.”97 The game does include the effect of seasons. In the period between November 11 and April 4, for example, all troops can advance only half the distance on any terrain compared to their possibilities during the summer months.98 Determined in advance by the rules of the game, however, one of the most elusive and unpredictable phenomena in war—the weather—is neutralized by its subsumption under the seasonal rules. Contingency and chance remain outside the purview of the war game. Indeed one review of Venturini’s game (written by “A retired war gamer”) claimed that war games could in principle never reach the complexity of war because its basic operative dynamics are fundamentally different and cannot be replicated by a medium: “It cannot reach this [complexity] completely, since so often in war unrepresentable accidents decide.”99 To create a true simulation of the state of war, the game, like the field exercises, would have to be infused with contingencies, and not merely as a peripheral element but as its core operative principle. Just two years later such a game was invented by Johann Ferdinand Opiz.

The Yes and No of the Dice Das Opiz’sche Kriegsspiel, ein Beitrag zur Bildung künftiger und zur Unterhaltung selbst der erfahrensten Taktiker (The Opiz War Game, a Contribution to the Bildung of Future Tacticians and to the Entertainment of Even the Most Experienced Tacticians) was published posthumously by his son in 1806.100 Replacing the conventional introduction, Opiz prints a letter he received three

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years earlier from a certain Baron Frehlich, a young officer in the Austrian Army with whom he had often played the game. This encomium, fervently encouraging Opiz to publish his invention, first lauds his realistic depiction of the terrain: “What a difference! What incomparably more important, far superior advantage compared to chess!—which admittedly practices the mind immensely in reflection, but in no way teaches the soldier the various and often mind-boggling impediments in an operation.”101 The truly original contribution of the game, however, the invention that severs it from its origin in chess, lies in its simulation of chance: “What gives your game the greatest resemblance to a war operation is this: that the result of the players’ dispositions does not always turn out according to their will, but often according to the less advantageous chance of the roll of the dice.—This singular feature of your game is a wonderful first-rate original thought, which lends your game a certain degree of perfection in the really useful way.—For this is how it is in real war. The dispositions of even the most experienced and daring commander are not always carried out to the letter, rather the effects of mutual fire and a thousand other chance occurrences often impact the dispositions and lead to a wrong or even a disastrous result.”102 In Opiz’s war game two dice determine events, for example, the impact of firepower, the capture of prisoners, desertion, and the success or failure to advance in mountainous terrain. The players still decide what possible events to effectuate, but the power to realize them is now transferred from the will of the players to the dice. When, for example, one player attempts to capture a part of the opponent’s forces, “the roll of the dice decides [ . . . ] the even numbers, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12 mean Yes, the uneven numbers, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, however, mean No.”103 The probability that a possible event is realized is further differentiated, such that if, for example, one player’s artillery attacks the opponent’s forces led by the commanding general, then the fate of the general is determined by the sum of the two dice: if the sum is 2 he is wounded, if it is between 3 and 11 he escapes unharmed, if 12 he is killed. If the attack is carried out by the infantry, however, an even sum of the dice kills the general, while an uneven number leaves him wounded.104 Whatever the varying probabilities, the realization of a possible event depends in all cases on “The Yes and No of the Dice.”105 The smooth and necessary transition from cause to effect in the predictable operating system of the earlier war games is here replaced by a causal system infiltrated by chance. Wedged between cause and effect, chance is inserted as an agent whose pres-

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ence and effects are ubiquitous. With the inclusion of dice, the concept of friction, which Clausewitz begins to develop at this time, is given a material correlate that replicates its effects in the simulated world of the game. What Clausewitz would proceed to do in the explicitly philosophical conception of war in On War, Opiz here anticipates with his war game, namely the introduction of a new epistemic regime. Not only is chance inserted as an operational principle; it also makes necessary a probabilistic analysis that weighs the probabilities of multiple future contingents and seeks to take the effects of chance into account. How the war game and its dynamic operations work in practice can be gleaned from the description by Baron Frehlich of one of the games he played with Opiz: You probably still remember that in our second to last game one of my forts in the mountains was besieged for quite some time but in vain because you could destroy neither the provisions nor the ammunition supply (since the dice were unfavorable), and therefore it was also impossible to advance your right flank, which was stronger than mine, without the utmost danger; for I only needed to move my main force to the center and to the right flank in order to cross the river, to approach your fortress on the plain from the mountain side, and then to unite this flank with the main force advancing on the plain, then to besiege your fortress with a part of the united troops, and upon conquering it, I would have controlled three quarters of the board.—Unfortunately the roll of the dice finally went your way during the siege of my fort, and my provisions were destroyed. The fort was challenged again, the roll of the dice affirmed the challenge, and now my fort fell into your hands. This accident led me to pull back my already weak left flank under the cannon fire of my water fortress, and to cover it long enough for reinforcements to arrive from the center, in part by sea on ships, in part on land, in order to protect the retreated corps, and even the fort itself and the other embankment.— With the capture of the fort, my observation corps, which was positioned in the mountains (between your center and your right flank) and which consisted of two light battalions and two fusilier battalions in addition to two cavalry divisions, suffered the greatest losses. Since this corps only had a single mountain pass for its retreat, since the mountains on both sides were insurmountable and even occupied here and there by your troops and my corps therefore could only march in a single column and not en front in several columns, it happened that three battalions and one cavalry division that formed the rearguard were captured. The remaining

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troops in the corps suffered such a substantial loss that I had to withdraw them for recuperation and replenishment.—Nevertheless I tried several times to scale the steep hills that surrounded my corps, but mostly the dice went against me. Only occasionally did the roll of the dice come out favorably for one corps or another.106

Baron Frehlich’s account of their game highlights the impact of chance in the progression of the war. The yes and the no of the dice determine events and bring about not a gradual progression, where one player slowly gains an advantage over the other, but sudden transformations in the balance of power. Because the provisions in a fort are destroyed by the attacker when the sum of the dice is 2, but remain intact when the sum is between 3 and 11, and the subsequent attack on the fort itself succeeds if the dice affirm the challenge twice but fails if it does not, there is no middle ground: either the attack succeeds or it fails.107 The binary logic together with the differentiated distribution of probabilities result in a game in which there is always the possibility that the sudden realization of an improbable event will transform everything. Since the improbability of an event is often inversely proportional to the vastness of its effects, the consequences of its realization are tremendous. The chance of the dice generates mischances, Un-fälle, that structure the game in a nonlinear fashion. Such contingent events introduce the greatest obstacle for both tactics and strategy. As a trial run of the simulation shows, chance enters as a third agent and a second opponent. In the words of Baron Frehlich, “Most of the time the dice went against me.” And the difficulty of handling contingency is compounded by a complex system in which maneuvers are conducted with masses. Faced with the double obstacle of a terrain in three dimensions and the uncertain outcome of the dice, Frehlich is unable to carry out his tactical retreat because the low probability of advancing in mountains applies to each of his battalions, not just to them all as a single unit. Frehlich’s description demonstrates the difficulties that beset the coordination of masses on an actual terrain, where the maneuvers of each individual unit are affected by chance. If one omits the self-referential aspects pertaining to the process of playing, that is, the comments about the dice and the rules of the game, the description itself is difficult to distinguish from an account of actual warfare. For Baron Frehlich the realism of the game is so striking that events on the board remind him of actual events during the recent campaign in Italy, “which carry a great resemblance to the events that occurred in your game. [ . . . ] Here on

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the board I did exactly the same as the immortal hero and leader of the Austrian Army had done there, when he lured the French out of the mountains and on to the Novi Plain, where the victorious, glorious, advantageous Battle of Novi had taken place on 15 August 1799.”108 The tactical move on the board is the exact equivalent of the tactical move in reality and, for a brief moment, transforms Frehlich into the immortal war hero of the Battle of Novi. The simulation does indeed, as Baudrillard states, rely on the maximum degree of correspondence with the real, but the distinction is in no way obviated, for the purpose of the game is explicitly educational. Not a replacement of the real, the game is an intermediary tool that allows the lessons learned while playing to be transferred back into the real. Frehlich strongly recommends military academies to purchase the game because it allows the military pedagogues “to make the theoretical lectures on basic principles, rules, and elements comprehensible to the students in that it shows and proves everything to them as if it had been performed in praxis and presented to the senses.”109 In addition to providing a practical, visual illustration of military theory, the game offers the student another kind of training: “Since, in the game, you cannot always put your faith in your experience and fearlessness, but must often leave your dispositions to chance, you also learn the perniciousness of the ever-changing, unpredictable fortunes of war, you become more cautious in your dispositions, you calculate every possible movement, and slowly, with good books readily at hand, you play your way effortlessly (spielend) into somewhat of a tactician, who with time not only learns to comprehend more easily the episodes and events on the vast scene of Mars,—but who can also prepare small operations himself.—I assure you that many ideas that would otherwise have appeared obscure, became clear to me on your board].”110 Unlike earlier war games, Opiz’s invention has the ability to train contingency management. Repeatedly exposed to the operations of chance, the players’ judgments and decisions will gradually begin to take stock of the uncertain and the unpredictable. With a different epistemic operating system, so to speak, the pedagogical lesson changes: military principles are visualized, and so is the difficulty of their practical application in a world suff used with friction. The innovative potential of Opiz’s war game lies in its ability to train judgment in conditions of intrinsic uncertainty. This kind of training relies not on the conceptual understanding of military theory but on the practical experience gained from the game, for while the player is more or less immobilized in front of the gaming table, by proxy, with his simulated self on the board, he experiences the state

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of war in praxis. The real action required of a practical training lies in the movements of the player’s extended self on the board, such that his judgments are developed spielend, that is, in the process of playing. More than a theoretical aid that visualizes concepts, the game offers practical training in contingency, so the players learn to comprehend the state of war better and to act in it more effectively. At the end of his instruction booklet, Opiz imagines placing the simulated selves in ships and offering them a practical training in naval warfare, just as Montbrison suggests that a “naval war game” could be invented on the basis of his own ground war game. Here meteorological phenomena such as winds and storms should also be determined by a roll of the dice.111 The “atmosphere of war,” as Clausewitz had put it, the medium in which warfare operates, is itself a contingent phenomenon governed by chance and managed by probability. The imagined simulation of naval warfare underscores how both contingency and probability were emerging as the new paradigms of warfare. As responses to the state of war around 1800, and as material tools that came to function as training devices, the war games are also symptoms of the shift in the perception of war. Read backward from the material objects themselves to the ideas they manifest, the games constitute a material history of the intellectual perception of war. From Hellwig to the inventions and developments implemented around 1800, the war game recapitulates, embodies, and visually manifests the changes in the conception of war: the emergence of the third dimension in the form of terrain representation and topographical maps; the expansion of military operations in the extension of the board; the pervasive impact of chance and the probabilistic order of knowledge in the introduction of dice; and the need for skills with which to manage the state of war in the game’s function as a practical training device that immerses individuals in contingency and exposes them to multiple concrete scenarios in order to produce habits and generate experience artificially. The war game had reached a degree of complexity that transformed it from a mere game into a simulation that could serve as an important instrument in the preparation for war. This is indicated by the fact that such games increasingly made their way into the educational program of official military institutions. Already Hellwig’s less sophisticated game is reported to have been admired as “an excellent means of Bildung for young officers” by the French generals Moreau and Ney,112 and after 1809 war games became part of the official curriculum in the Berlin academy. Scharnhorst created a special divi-

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sion of the War Ministry in 1809 that was charged with, among other things, the training and education of the officers, and he himself introduced war games in his lessons on tactics and strategy.113 While the central trope of educational theory had shifted from the desk to the battlefield, the battlefield could now be re-created on the desk. The state of war had to be produced in order for it to be managed. The adoption of war games as training devices was thus the result of a formal transformation. As the state of war could enter the field exercises only if they were restructured, it entered the war game by way of a transformation of the representational and operational makeup of the games. In other words, changing the how of ludic representation was essential to turning a game into a simulation. An analogous transformation of forms, however, can be detected in a different medium at the same time: texts. In spite of the continued innovations within the genre of the war game, the text was regarded as the preeminent medium for the simulation of the state of war. While inventors grappled with the problem of how to create new forms that could generate the state of war in field exercises and war games, writers working in the narrative medium therefore faced a related difficulty: war as a problem of poetics.

The Poetics of Contingency Unraveling Historiography “To represent the accidental as accidental.” In the midst of reorganizing the Prussian Army after the defeats of 1806, Gerhard von Scharnhorst wrote a brief text entitled Nutzen der militärischen Geschichte: Ursach ihres Mangels (The Use of Military History: The Cause of Its Flaws). Realizing the importance of military history for the training of officers, Scharnhorst advocates its use but is critical of its form. Military historiography, as Scharnhorst sees it, fails to provide an adequate representation of war on a number of counts. Like his student Clausewitz, Scharnhorst was skeptical about the scientific pretensions of much military theory and regarded war as a complex system of interdependent events in which the impact of chance was pervasive.114 Historians, however, use individual battles to confirm preconceived rules of warfare and thereby read a mass of individual events through the lens of a simple abstract schema; they also reduce the complexity of war to a “scene of heroes”: “The historian should present the events that took place not as actions of individuals, but in

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their complete relations to other events. However, he is more comfortable with the first kind of representation and it is also the most entertaining for the readers. The historian can choose the moment in which he wants his hero to appear; we therefore always see him only in his parade outfit, and where he would like to be seen.”115 In this way war as an “event” is transformed from a multiplicity of interconnected causes and effects, that is, from a partially uncontrollable and obscure mass of micro events, into a limited number of autonomous actions—the event as the result of a sovereign decision, and war as a heroic theater played by two actors. This reduction leaves out of consideration elements that for Scharnhorst are central to warfare: the many errors that are committed; the impediments of the terrain; the state of knowledge, which is frequently deficient or simply wrong. And it leads to a military history that is of little use as a training device: “In short, it contains so few elements that instruct us and enable us to form our judgment in this field.”116 In spite of the copious material at hand, the soldier is unable to train his judgment because the texts do not offer an actual simulation of the state of war. The problem for Scharnhorst, then, lies in “the nature of the historiographic representation itself,” that is, in the realm of poetics.117 Either military history is written in a dry style that seeks to systematize the events instead of describing them, in which case the readers quickly find themselves in a “chaos of errors and false conclusions,” or the narrative is embellished with “strong colors.”118 In both cases military history is nothing more than “a highly improbable novel.”119 In his Aphorismen published a year earlier, Berenhorst had articulated a critique of the historiographic exclusion of all future contingents and also of all exceptions to the rule, of mistakes, of the impact of meteorological imponderabilities: Of the ceaseless groping in the dark, of the cautious weighing of possibilities, of the paralyzing search for leadership (all torments for a commander who is not also the ruler of the state), the historians do not inform us and they hardly have any idea of it themselves, and the most astonishing thing is that neither do the authors of treatises on the art of war. The unfortunate commanders, from whom one could expect such insight, usually do not issue any warning of the mirages that misled them, as little as they write textbooks on the exceptions to the rules on which they based their sad experience. The fortunate ones and to an even greater extent the people who surround them like to brag a bit, they conceal what they owe to the

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night, the fog, the wind, the rain and the frost, the errors of the enemy, the ineptitude of his supporters and those in his commission, the lack of goodwill among his common soldiers; their purpose is to keep the clueless masses in the belief that they, the victors, brought about every success with their cunning and calculating minds, with their eagle eye.120

Seeking to overcome this deficiency, Scharnhorst suggests a new poetics adequate to the contemporary state of war. His efforts in the reorganization of the Prussian Army are thus given a media correlative in his attempt to restructure texts. Equally technologies of war, both the army and texts are in need of a fundamental restructuring. Scharnhorst here outlines what could be called a poetics of contingency. He considers the primary task of the writer to be the depiction of errors, of chance, of the complex interdependence of a multiplicity of contingent events. In other words, the goal of the new kind of writing is to describe the epistemic regime of the Napoleonic Wars: “to represent the accidental as accidental, to reveal the mistakes etc.” Scharnhorst turns traditional historiography inside out and suggests that precisely what it has excluded in its attempt to create coherence and clarity should become its central topic. An instructive military history concerns itself precisely with the breakdowns, the misunderstandings, with limited perspectives, improbable and unforeseen catastrophes, incomplete accounts, contradictory reports, and false information. Historians should write not the history of successful campaigns but that of failures: For the contemporaries it is important as quickly as possible to read a description of a war in which they failed. Thereby they learn the art of waging war. [ . . . ] Thereby disadvantageous habits, false principles in the administration of the various branches of the materiel, an inappropriate organization of the army’s inner structure, neglect of the usual rules, etc. are all brought to light, recognized to be ruinous and changed in the following wars.121

While a systematizing historiography that seeks to confirm rules of military theory leads to a chaos of false inferences, the description of chaos itself, of the constant confluence of numerous different causal chains and their unpredictable effects, leads to better judgment and gives occasion to revise one’s theory and to adapt it to the actual state of affairs. Informed by such a poetics

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of contingency, texts provide a virtual experience whose effects are more powerful than rational inquiry. Scharnhorst believes that the way war is waged depends mostly on conventions, tradition, and habits that are all but resistant to reason.122 When properly written, however, texts provide a simulated experience of the state of war, and instead of developing arguments it shows directly, in the virtual flesh, so to speak, the character and dynamics of a concrete situation—and thereby makes felt whatever disjunction might obtain between the state of war and the attempt to manage it. The power of the text stems not from the complexity of the signifying system that allows for the development of a sustained detailed argument but from its ability to conjure up a virtual reality that offers a direct, if fictional, experience. Where reason is impotent in the face of conventions, texts, according to Scharnhorst, generate artificially an experience whose imaginary but powerful presence and there-ness avoids the detour of rational argumentation and instead has a direct impact on one’s habits. To redeploy a concept originally coined by Roman Jakobson, we might say that for Scharnhorst the “poetic function” of the text is to serve as a catalyst that changes bad habits into good habits. But how, more precisely, is this change to occur? Scharnhorst complains that it is a rare occurrence that a commander who has successfully managed the contingencies of war has also been given the talent and taken the time to describe his methods in writing.123 His own brief text emphasizes the importance of texts as a military training device and points to the central role of poetics, but it also raises the question of how exactly military strategies are connected to textual strategies, how the art of war translates into the art of writing.

History without Facts At the military school in Berlin the method of instruction was primarily that of examples. In “Immediat-Bericht über den Zustand der Kriegsschule zu Berlin am Schluß des ersten Jahres 1811” (Report on the State of the Military School in Berlin at the End of the First Year 1811) Scharnhorst regards the analysis of concrete historical scenarios as an antidote to theoretical speculation. They have the advantage “of replacing the lack of war experience and avoiding the danger of getting lost in visions.”124 Scharnhorst’s student, Clausewitz, who also taught at the school likewise proceeded according to this method, for, as he writes, only with examples is it possible “to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, as the French Codex has it.”125 In his lectures Clausewitz explicitly advocates military history as a means with which the students

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can train their judgment.126 For military history to fulfill this goal, however, the traditional conception of what history has to offer must be recalibrated, for “how many people do not read history without learning anything from it except the historical fact.”127 History should not be regarded as a large repository of facts, for this kind of academic knowledge is of secondary importance for practice. What matters is the acquisition of good judgment. Discussing the necessary preconditions for tactics and strategy, Clausewitz writes, “Very little knowledge and much training of the judgment, very few abstract truths and a strong outlook that is so intimately connected to the mind that it often cannot be distinguished from himself as a person, in short, as the philosophers say: little matter, great form of thought. And how does one give the mind this form? In the constant exposure to history! So a general must be an erudite scholar of history?—God forbid! He should have studied history, he should have shaped his mind while wrestling with it; whether he knows the specific facts of history or not is truly unimportant.”128 Reading military history consists of practical training sessions that develop and give form to the power of judgment.129 For this practice the historical content of the texts is unimportant; it is merely matter necessary to make the operational dynamics of war manifest. Clausewitz had defined this dynamic with his concept of friction, but he also warned that it could be understood completely only by direct exposure, that is, in actual experience. Texts, however, function as a useful substitute, for “in the absence of actual experience, only the study of military history [is] capable of giving a vivid understanding of what I have here called the friction of the entire machine.”130 Texts, then, provide concrete scenarios that serve as a catalyst to make friction visible. In a certain sense (and in this sense only) Clausewitz subtracts the historical from history, for while the dynamics of war are directly dependent on the war machinery and the tactical and strategic practices of a given historical period, the facts are in themselves irrelevant.131 They become transparent in their function as the elements that allow the multiple connections and interdependencies between them that constitute the process of warfare to emerge. A history without facts, it is cast as the opposite of the many “manuals” that provide simple laws and rules for the art of war.132 If a certain tactical move appears successful in various examples, then it can be adopted as a provisional rule of thumb, but if history is read as a how-to handbook, then it will generate soldiers of the ilk of Oberst Wolzogen, whom Clausewitz regards as the most knowledgeable in the Russian army but a person who suffers from “a certain

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kind of general staff bookishness” and lacks the practical habitual knowledge deemed necessary for the state of war: “Whoever wants to move in an element such as that of war, should bring absolutely nothing from books with him except the schooling of his mind; if he brings prefabricated ideas that are not given to him by the impact of the moment, that he hasn’t produced with his own flesh and blood, then the stream of events will crush his building before it is finished.”133 Wolzogen has taken a misguided approach to military history and mined it for theoretical rules instead of subjecting himself to it as a training device that teaches the complex workings of war. It is precisely because history offers no rules or laws but only “singularities” (Eigentümlichkeiten) that it is useful: “If history does not offer any formulas, here as everywhere it provides training of judgment.”134

The Texture of War: Examples, Real and Imaginary Clausewitz’s conception of military history, its peculiar lack of historicity, becomes clear in a chapter in On War devoted specifically to examples. Here he states that the main function of historical examples is either to illustrate how concrete circumstances influence the implementation of a planned endeavor, that is, the impact of friction, or to concretize an abstract thought in order to facilitate comprehension. In both cases “the [historical] correctness of the example . . . is irrelevant.” One might just as well make use of “an invented example.”135 For the purpose of education, fact and fiction have equal explanatory power if only they present in detail concrete examples in which “the entire web” of war is depicted with all its many threads.136 The textual character of the example is thus independent of the fact/fiction distinction. The effect of the example, its justification as a pedagogical tool is a matter not of ontology but of poetics. Like Scharnhorst, however, Clausewitz is critical of the writings of historians because “they make history instead of writing it.”137 The problem is that of the coherence of the text. The narrative structure itself is seen as a post hoc rationalization that systematizes a series of disjunctive fragments. The plot or, to cite Ricoeur, the “intrigue” that links separate elements together creates a coherence and clarity that engender an illusory omniscience.138 The narrative structure excludes the uncertainties, probabilities, and contingencies that make up the state of war and are necessary textual elements for military history to fulfill its educational purpose. Instead Clausewitz advocates the reading of separate reports and diaries that were written from a situated perspective in medias res, where knowledge is limited and the narrative

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glue that connects the different perspectives has not yet been poured into the text. In such documents the future is open and consists of a cloud of more or less probable possibilities that might all be realized. However, the difficult weighing of these possibilities, which is central to the epistemic regime of war as Clausewitz defines it, these “mental struggles,” is most often left out such that “no one who sticks to the narrative sees anything of the difficulties that had to be surmounted.”139 Excluding the epistemic regime of contingency and probability, historiography writes the state of war out of the text. Contingency requires a different kind of poetics. The language Clausewitz uses to characterize war and writing is revealing in this regard, for he states that only seldom does “a part of the several threads that forms the entire web see the light of day.”140 In Clausewitz’s metaphor the tertium comparationis of war and writing is the compact bundling of numerous strings of a textile fabric. As a text, following its etymology, is woven (texere, to weave) by the strings of the warp and the weft, so warfare is made up of numerous densely packed and interwoven strings of causes and effects.141 To give a sense of the texture of war, the text that describes it should itself have an analogous structure. Clausewitz’s own works are exemplary in this regard. His historical writings often seek to reconstruct the state of knowledge at a given time—who knew what when and with what probability. An example is the belated arrival of the reserve in Historische Briefe über die großen Kriegsereignisse 1806, 1807 (Historical Letters on the Great Military Events in 1806, 1807): “Only, the reserve probably arrived too late. I say probably; for in the melee of battle the mere observation of the senses is not sufficient to get an overview of it all, and if you do not receive any reports then you cannot always judge what could and must have happened.”142 He continues, “Besides, they most likely did not know the circumstances surrounding the Battle of Jena and hoped that by unifying both armies they would again have a considerable number of troops such that they could calmly retreat in good order.”143 In this way not just the borders of knowledge are staked out but also the probabilistic nature of all information outside of the radius of one’s immediate sight. In modern theory narrative has been described as “a solution to the problem of a general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling.”144 In Clausewitz we find the articulation of a narrative epistemology where the problem is to find an appropriate form specifically for the limitations of knowledge, for it is not enough to simply describe the epistemic conditions. True understanding, according to Clausewitz, is the product of “living” representations.145

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Experience provides such representations, but texts rarely do so. The task of military history is therefore not only to describe the epistemic conditions but also to generate such living representations.

Narrative Modality and Anthropomorphic Space Clausewitz’s own historical writings set the example. In the history of the campaigns in Italy in 1799, for instance, he describes Suvorov’s conquest of an important bridge in the following terms: “Such was the state of affairs when Suvorov on the morning of the 25th pushed forward to the Urner tunnel with the front of his troops. The first battalion rushed courageously into the dark gorge that exhaled the terror of an unknown destruction into the face of the suspecting mind; the following troops pushed on from behind; and now it was impossible for the avant-garde to back off when they saw the open abyss beneath the Devil’s Bridge; they were now pushed and shoved in dense masses on the narrow path between the rocks and the depths, gunned down by the murderous fire of the enemy, and in the whirling confusion several were sent tumbling into the abyss.”146 Jean-Jacques Langendorff has compared this passage to the accounts of the same event offered by Jomini and Archduke Charles of Austria, and he concludes that where the first aims at precision and the second at being succinct, Clausewitz first and foremost seeks to put himself into the midst of the events in order to convey impressions. Langendorff links this method with what Peter Paret has called Clausewitz’s “phenomenological” approach in the Husserlian sense of an epoché, that is, of performing an abstraction to reveal the essential features of a phenomenon.147 It is certainly true that Clausewitz’s analyses have as their express goal “the nature of things,” as he himself puts it, but he (and Paret) are here speaking about the role of theory, not of historiography or of examples.148 Langendorff ’s reference to phenomenology is apt at a different level, however. Clausewitz bombards the sensory apparatus with input in order to show how a given concrete situation appears to someone, how it is experienced. Generating the “one hundred thousand impressions” that pummel the soldier, Clausewitz simulates the phenomenological experience of war in order to give the reader a living representation, that is, a representation that, with its lifelike qualities, serves as a tool to convey the conditions of war.149 This kind of representation is particular to texts. In the draft of On War Clausewitz noted down a brief critique of war games. He sees their invention as a further degeneration of the ill-conceived notion that the art of war is a

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calculation of maneuvers, as in a game of chess.150 While he is most likely speaking of its early forms, his critique nevertheless applies to the later permutations as well. What they lack, he continues, is a consideration of psychological factors. Unable to simulate affects, war games are too rational; they do not take the impact of war on the embodied mind into account. Texts therefore make up for a deficiency in the game simulations. With text Clausewitz seeks to re-create as far as possible the effects of war on the human sensorium. This method is not restricted to his historical writings. In spite of the fact that On War is a philosophical analysis of war, the analytical discourse is at times interrupted by passages in a different style. The chapter “On Danger in War,” for example, begins with a critique of the common lack of understanding of the impact of danger and then proceeds in the following manner: Let us accompany the recruit onto the battlefield. As we approach, the increasingly loud thunder of the cannon is followed by the howling of bullets, which attracts the attention of the inexperienced. Bullets begin to strike the ground close to us, before and behind. We run toward the hill where the commanding officer is positioned with his large retinue. Here the impact of the cannonballs and the explosion of shells become so frequent that the seriousness of life shatters the adolescent fantasy. Suddenly a friend falls to the ground—a shell explodes in the crowd and sets off a number of involuntary movements—you begin to feel that you are losing your calm and your composure.—Now one step further into the battle which is raging in front of us, still almost like a scene in a theater, on to the next division general; here bullet follows bullet and the noise of the artillery increases your distraction. From the division general to the brigadier—a man of recognized valor, who stands cautiously behind a hill, a house or some trees;— a certain sign of the increasing danger—grapeshot rattles on the roofs of the houses and in the fields; cannonballs howl over us, and plough the air in all directions, and soon there is a frequent whistling of musket bullets; one step further toward the troops, toward the infantry that for hours has withstood a heated attack with indescribable pertinacity; here the air is filled with the hissing of bullets that announce their proximity by a short sharp noise as they pass within an inch of the ear, the head, or the chest. Moreover, by the sight of the mutilated bodies and the falling soldiers, compassion strikes our pounding heart with misery.151

The passage constructs what we might call an anthropomorphic space—a space defined by the situated human perspective. Clausewitz collapses the distance

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between the reader and the text when he leads the reader into the representation itself and describes the battle as it gradually unfolds in the experience of the readers. The battlefield emerges deictically before and behind the reader as determined by the impact of the bullets relative to the reader’s body. Clausewitz purposefully transgresses the invisible fourth wall of the stage and makes the reader a participant on and in the theater of war.152 The sensory apparatus that the description activates is thereby expanded to include also auditory and emotional experience. Filled with hissing bullets, the air is literally shot through by increasingly dangerous and unpredictable events flying “in all directions.” The concrete space of the battlefield is only the physical container for a more amorphous field of danger that suff uses the geographical space in different degrees of concentration and that has a direct impact on the soldier’s and reader’s emotions. Clausewitz writes, “None of these different density levels of danger will impact the recruit without him feeling that here the light of reason moves through different media, it is bent into different rays than during speculative contemplation.”153 The aim of the passage is thus to show how the experience of a spatial modality—danger—influences the process of thought and action. To effect this understanding, Clausewitz’s own text switches modality.154 The analytical dissection of war into its component parts is interrupted by a sequential, fictional narrative that attempts to bring about the emotional effect of danger, such that it is not just the soldier but also the reader who in the end has lost his composure and is left with a pounding heart. This type of representation cannot be reduced to mere “literary spice,” as one critic puts it.155 In the textual simulation, the recruit serves as the reader’s avatar and provides vicariously an experience of the state of war. The bodily reaction emphasizes that while the living representation is generated by poetics, its effect is dependent on the simulation of experience, on a kind of understanding that is anchored more in the emotions and the body than in a purely rational conception. Clausewitz’s poetics is thus informed by an epistemological and an affective concern. As indicated by the concept of tact, judgment is a product first and foremost of the feeling (Gemüt). Given its amphibious nature, it provides quick calculations and its instinctual nature also connects it to various emotions, the most important one being courage. In between the Kantian categories of the intuition and the understanding, Clausewitz inserts an emotional layer as an additional transcendental category through which all sensory input must pass: “[Courage] is so to speak the crystal lens through which percep-

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tions must pass before they reach the understanding.”156 Operating in the medium of danger, the soldier’s sensory input is refracted by his emotional state and makes his subsequent judgments directly dependent on affects. As the tact of judgment as a general ability is the best means with which to manage contingency, courage more specifically is the best means with which to counter danger.157 Clausewitz here distinguishes between two kinds of courage that influence judgment: the courage of the understanding and personal courage. The former arises out of the necessity of taking risks. It is the courage “to calculate with the uncertain and to arrange your action accordingly.”158 While rational in its conception, this kind of courage is dependent on an emotionally based “faith in uncertain things and in good luck.”159 Even in the higher echelons of the army, where tactical and strategic scenarios are projected, judgment has an emotional foundation. In the lower ranks, however, the second kind of courage is needed. It is the ability to shut out “too vivid impressions of danger from the soul” in order to free the activity of the understanding.160 Against the storm of sensory impressions the soldier must shield himself with a firm belief in himself, such that he will not lose his composure when he “needs to make apt decisions in the heat of the moment.”161 For the inexperienced, however, it is difficult to comprehend the affective impact on judgment because it emerges as a decisive factor only in the state of war. In civil human commerce sensory data are usually not inflected by such intense affects, and, Clausewitz adds, this is particularly the case for readers of traditional military history: “To follow the insights of reason in its decisions is only natural for the mind [Gemüt] when it is not moved by any affections, and it is impressive when reason is able to assert its reign over an affected mind. With regards to the state of mind, the first condition usually describes the reader while the second condition describes the commander. What for the reader appears to lie below the limit of the natural, i.e. the usual, however, is often not even above the limit at all. To realize the correctness of this statement you must know that the mind of anyone who has an important position in war is affected by an infinite number of things.”162 Unaffected, readers are usually able to follow the precepts of their mind, but in this pristine condition they thereby misjudge the situation in the state of war. The poetics that informs both Clausewitz’s historical writings and the fictional passages in On War instead seeks to put the readers in an affective state, to expose them to dangers and contingencies such that the text generates the elevated state of

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mind and body necessary to counter them. While courage functions as a transcendental category that organizes experiential data, it can nevertheless be trained. The fictional production of living images of the state of war serves to inculcate “steadfastness, pertinacity, strength of mind [Gemüt] and character.”163 In this way the transformation of abstract knowledge into practical know-how is effected by texts, by the fictional passages that generate in the reader the auditory, visual, and emotional experiences of the battlefield. Raymond Aron suggests that for Clausewitz history is the laboratory of theory.164 This is true, but only for historical texts informed by a certain poetics, and it cannot be restricted to the field of history. More generally we might say that all texts have the potential for becoming a training ground for judgment. The new theory of the state of war that Clausewitz develops in On War is thus tied up with a new theory of representation. The elements of friction that he regards as intrinsic to the operational dynamics of war need to be accommodated by its media, and that entails a restructuring of the operational dynamics of texts. Keenly aware that this double reconfiguration of both thinking and writing might confound his readers, Clausewitz anticipated their objections. Expecting to hear of “angles and lines,” the reader finds “instead of these citizens of the scientific world only people from real life, like the ones he meets every day on the street. And yet the author refuses to be a hair’s breadth more mathematical than the subject requires, and he is not afraid of the bewilderment the reader might experience.”165 With Clausewitz, then, in both theory and in practice the state of war enters the text as a structural technique. Here we witness the birth of the spirit of war out of the poetics of the text and the transformation of the text into a training device. Around 1800 experience becomes increasingly artificial. This takes away nothing of its reality, but now it is created as a product of media. Maps, dice, and texts are transformed into technologies of experience that, through different simulations of the state of war, train the users to manage contingency. As a form of knowledge, experience is thus reappraised. Hobbes had excluded “that originall knowledge called Experience” from philosophy because it is not attained by reasoning. Moreover, as a memory of successions of past events, “the omission of every little circumstance altering the effect, frustrateth the expectation of the most Prudent.” Instead of excluding circumstances, however, empirically minded military thinkers and inventors such as Rühle von Lilienstern, Kleist, Opiz, Scharnhorst, and Clausewitz actively

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seek to produce frustration in order to generate experience in how to tackle the unexpected. Such contingency training requires immersion in simulated concrete settings. The book thereby regains some of the status Rousseau had taken away from it, for while war games in the form of high-tech computer simulators would eventually win the day, the text is still the most advanced technology at the time for the virtual experience of a stochastic world. In the absence of fi xed rules and certain truths, there is no longer “a sure path to happiness,” as Kleist had written to Rühle in 1799, but if one immerses oneself in textual contingencies, the chance of success might at least become somewhat more probable. Ludic and textual contingency management has a graphical counterpart. As I already hinted, the military map emerges as a central tool to handle the increased complexity and vast expansion of war around 1800. If texts seek to bring us into the world they construct, the map seemingly pulls us out of it. The spatial hazards of the terrain become the object of distance control. As will be evident in chapter 6, this difference between maps and texts becomes a problematic but productive force that lies at the crux of the development of the realist novel of the nineteenth century. These texts are produced against the background of the enormous mapping enterprise that takes shape in the first decades of the century. Let us first consider the cartographic apparatus: Napoleon’s empire of paper.

5

KL Paper Empires Military Cartography and the Management of Space

n 1813 one of Napoleon’s armies arrives in Silesia after two victorious battles and a number of smaller skirmishes. The advance into new territory puts the army in a predicament. Bacler d’Albe, Napoleon’s chief cartographer, writes back to Paris from the front: “We have now arrived in Silesia. I am truly in a difficult situation; no supply wagons, no maps! I understand nothing of this maneuver. This damned supply wagon, it will arrive after the war is over! Send me with the greatest speed a part of the area between Dresden and the Niemen river. [ . . . ] I want the part to cover all of Silesia and the Oder River until Kustrin. The rest of the map of the North and the East can arrive later; the essential thing is to have Silesia. The major general must have ordered you to engrave the map he found this winter; if we have it here, now is the time to use it! Get us out of this mess and send it quickly by courier, cut it into transportable pieces if necessary.”1 The period around 1800 witnessed an explosion in the production, dissemination, and use of cartography. Toward the end of his now classical study on cartography, Max Eckart writes grandly, “Around 1800, the cartographic revolution begins.”2 This revolution was a product of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The new spatial order of warfare inaugurated by Napoleon,

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the grandes opérations of several individual armies in the extended terrain, created an urgent need for new methods of spatial management, and the military map became the most advanced and efficient tool. As Bacler d’Albe’s letter indicates, maps came to constitute a media a priori for the planning and execution of large-scale warfare. Its importance notwithstanding, an authoritative book is still waiting to be written on the subject.3 Moreover Anne Godlewska claims that the implications of Napoleonic mapping for the broader society have never been studied.4 The same thing can be said about the implications for the conception of war. This can perhaps be explained by the complexity of the object. As a media event, the great development of cartography at this time was dependent on the convergence of a number of factors. Not simply an instrument of orientation, the military map is a complex historical object in which science, statecraft, bureaucracy, and military theory are all intertwined with questions of space, epistemology, and representation.5 One might here speak of a cartographic apparatus that serves a strategic purpose and meets an urgent demand of the state. While it is well beyond the scope of this chapter to provide a comprehensive account of the cartographic apparatus around 1800, in the first part I sketch out the entanglement of the various elements that compose it as well as the process whereby it came to be installed during the Napoleonic Wars. In other words, I examine how the management of a military empire became dependent on its symbolic double, on the extensive production and organization of an empire of paper. In the second part I focus on the cartographic image itself and in particular on the diverging constructions of time. On the one hand, the representational forms of military maps were directly impacted by the contingencies of the state of war, but, on the other hand, maps also sought to domesticate them. In the varying cartographic images themselves, one can detect how poetics is shaped by war and also how the conception of war is itself a product of poetics.

The Cartographic Apparatus Triangles Toward the end of the eighteenth century General Calon, the director of the central map depot in Paris, the Dépôt de la guerre, hoped to profit from the fortunate location of his army in the western Pyrenees. His ambition was not to conquer a territory but to obtain “a precious series of triangles.”6 Calon would

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send his “topographical engineers” into the field to perform a number of geometrical triangulations necessary to create an accurate map of a given territory. The importance of triangulation for military mapping had only recently been acknowledged. Both Caesar and Agrippa encouraged the use of maps,7 and Flavius Vegetius in his influential fourth-century treatise on warfare, Epitoma Rei Militaris (Epitome of Military Science), writes that the commander “ought to have thoroughly detailed maps of all the regions in which the war is waged so that he might learn the distances between places, not only in number of miles, but also in regard to the condition of the roads, so that he might be aware of the short cuts, the bypaths, the mountains, the rivers, which are all accurately described.”8 But these maps were imprecise and not based on geodetic measurements. When Machiavelli in 1521 recommended maps to the warring general in his treatise Dell’arte della guerra (Art of War), they were nevertheless seen only as a supplement to the geographic knowledge provided by guides.9 In this respect little had changed since Antiquity. In Thucydides’s account of the Peloponnesian War, reliance on the spatial knowledge of locals meant that the death of a guide could lead to the destruction of the better part of an Athenian army.10 And while Vauban around 1700 had produced a number of fairly accurate topographical maps of the terrain surrounding fortifications, around 1800 an anonymous topographical engineer at the Dépôt de la guerre could only regret that “Vauban did not extend his maps beyond the radius of the site” and left to posterity only “fragments of great beauty.”11 Toward the middle of the eighteenth century the situation changed because of the method of triangulation. In simple terms, triangulation allows the cartographer to measure distance with a high degree of accuracy by using a simple rule of geometry: if you know the length of one side and the degrees of two angles of a triangle, the length of the other two sides can simply be calculated and not painstakingly measured. Cartographers would therefore establish a baseline from the known length of one side of the triangle, and then from each end of the baseline draw the other two sides to meet at a church or some natural landmark. In this way one measurement provided the lengths of three sides of a triangle that might cover hundreds of kilometers. Inside these vast triangles, the measurements would continue with second- and third-order triangulations. Brigade General Pierre Alexandre Joseph Allent describes the process: Engineers scatter across the surface of the territory and with their instruments they calculate the imaginary lines with which they unite the main

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points of the country: even the heavens are interrogated in order to get to know the land. Others inscribe smaller triangles within this network of triangles, and guided by the numerous points they determine, they project the contours of the terrain and all the objects it offers onto the surface of a map. Imitative drawing, even painting, comes to the aid of geometry, and on this rigorous canvas, they produce the forms and colors as if by magic: it is nature itself reduced to the dimensions of its image. Th is is the result of an exact, careful mapping, subjected to all the perfections of astronomical operations, geodesy, and the ordering of the terrain.12

Gemma Frisius first described the theory of geodetic triangulation in 1533, and Tycho Brahe used the method in 1578–1579 to establish the position of the Danish island of Hven in relation to the rest of Denmark.13 The merging of cartography and geometry, however, did not become standard practice until the eighteenth century. Here the two so-called Cassini maps of France led the way.14 The first map (Figure 5.1) in eighteen sheets was finished by members of the Cassini family in 1744; they retained the triangle networks that ground the accuracy of the maps. As Joseph Konvitz puts it, the triangles provided “graphic proof that the map’s content was reliable.”15 After Cassini’s Nouvelle carte many overview maps of triangulation networks were produced on which the topography in various degrees has faded into the background to make the triangles stand out clearly. On these it is less the territory and more the method that is mapped, presenting a visual display of the growing scientification of cartography in the eighteenth century.16 With the Cassini maps, France was meticulously mapped for the first time, and cartography was given a scientific foundation that radically increased the precision and usefulness of maps.17 With the transformations of the art of war around 1800 and Napoleon’s expansionist politics, the adoption of a geometrical method made the map an important instrument of war; therefore cartography was widely militarized. In 1793 the state confiscated Cassini’s incomplete Carte de France,18 an act that illustrates the first of two opposing but complementary tendencies of the Napoleonic cartographic apparatus: centralization and mobility.

Central Cartography The centralization of military cartography is evident in its institutional history. To meet the increasing requests from the French Army, the Dépôt de la guerre,

Cassini’s map of France. The triangulation networks that ground its accuracy have been retained on the map and present a visual display of the growing scientification of cartography in the eighteenth century. From César-François Cassini de Thury, Giovanni Domenico Maraldi, and Guillaume Dheulland, Nouvelle carte qui comprend les principaux triangles qui servent de fondement à la description géométrique de la France (Paris, 1744). Universitätsbibliothek Bern.

figure 5.1

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which had been dissolved during the Revolution, was established anew in 1794 as the core institution for military cartography. Its task was to produce, collect, and organize all kinds of military maps, but its efforts could not keep up with Napoleon’s expansionist politics. There were few accurate maps, and even the printing paper was in short supply. General Calon, the director, writes: Disregarding the general map of France, the majority of the maps we have conquered and collected from foreign nations are highly flawed because they have been made only through approximation or from more or less reliable memoirs. It is to anticipate this inconvenience during war that the Republic should support [ . . . ] the director of the Dépôt de la Guerre in taking the measures necessary for the execution and the precision of the work, etc.19

Calon himself soon began educating officers in mapping techniques, and in 1803 the Dépôt de la guerre published the Mémorial topographique et militaire, which includes a brief survey of its own institutional history and a self-reflection on its own standing. Created by Louis XIV in 1688, the Dépôt had in recent years developed into “the richest, most numerous collection with the most authentic objects of history, topography, and military science. It is one of those collections you only find in France, one of those that sets the example for other enlightened and military nations of Europe.”20 The self-congratulatory tone aside, this was correct. Producing, collecting, and organizing military maps, the Dépot became the center of French cartography with a collection that far exceeded that of any other nation.21 The authors of the Mémorial hope that a map of Austria that General Grénier had found in Linz would soon be engraved “such that there is no topographical lacuna from Paris all the way to Vienna.”22 Napoleon strove toward the ideal of a complete cartographic empire, but his primary motivation was the expansion and management of his military empire. The changed nature of warfare now made topographical knowledge, once merely an auxiliary aid, the condition of possibility for grand operations. The new role of the map is expressed in no uncertain terms in the Mémorial: Arbitrator of combats, often called in to the supreme councils of war where the crucial considerations regarding the fi xation or the defense of frontiers are in the balance, where those strategies and military operations are drawn that impact the destiny of empires and the fate of entire peoples, what light does the commander cast on these great deliberations, with what precision

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does he inform their opinions if he cannot see at once all the characteristics of the vast zone where he must make the defensive or offensive dispositions using the rivers, the mountains, the sites and the armies, if, that is, he does not read the terrain, from whose grand objects the most insightful ideas ultimately emerge? And how is his mental eye to traverse the vast theater of his conceptions, if topography does not come to his aid with a reliable image? How often, when he has descended on to the battlefield, is he not seized by a deep worry and fatal uncertainty, if he needs to see everything and he does manage to get a general idea of the disposition but cannot afterward think it over on a map that presents everything at once and with sufficiently precise details to show him what he can hope for and what he should fear, what he should conceal or investigate; on a map which also shows him the position of the enemy and partly reveals the objective of their movements and the secret of their mistakes! Moreover, as soon as the voice of war is heard, you see the incredible avidity with which those who respond to its cry at all costs seek out the topography of the regions that will become its theater or object!23

With accurate topographical knowledge as a strategic and tactical necessity, maps, even if they did not solely determine the fate of empires, nevertheless did become an indispensable tool for their creation and management. While maps had been used in earlier times during military campaigns, this is the first time that an advanced media technology completely pervaded the art of war and transferred spatial management to a symbolic plane. And the center of this paper empire was the Dépôt de la guerre. It was therefore from this institution that Napoleon in 1796 requested a number of maps for his campaign in Italy. After the Battle of Marengo in 1800, however, Napoleon preferred to have the maps in his immediate presence, and that changed the structure of the cartographic organization. As his personal secretary, Agathon-Jean-François Fain, notes in his memoirs, he is surely not the first secretary to turn historian, but he is most likely the first secretary to write a historical treatise on the work methods of his superior: “I think that Napoleon would lose more than any other person if he would not be seen from this new point of view.”24 Fain’s judgment rests in part on the topographical offices that Napoleon had established. For example, Napoleon had installed a bureau topographique in the Tuileries Palace. As can be seen in Figure 5.2, the topographical bureau was set up in the cabinet des cartes between his bedroom and his study. It con-

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figure 5.2 Napoleon’s bureau topographique in the Tuileries Palace. From AgathonJean-François Fain, Mémoires du Baron Fain: Premier secrétaire du cabinet de l’empereur publiés par ses arrière-petits-fils, avec une introduction et des notes (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1908). Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.

sisted of a collection of maps that Napoleon had ordered from the Dépôt de la guerre and a large table for their display. Similar topographical bureaus were established in the castles of St. Cloud, Compiègne, Rambouillet, and Fontainebleau such that Napoleon would always have cartographic material ready at hand. Because of the size of some of the maps, Napoleon and Bacler d’Albe

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often had to lie down on them in order to inspect the terrain more closely. As Fain reports, he often witnessed their strategic discussion cut short by a sudden exclamation, “when their heads collided too violently with each other.”25

Maps in Space In step with Napoleon’s military victories, additional regional nodes were added to the cartographic network, as several of Europe’s topographical bureaus were founded by Napoleon after his invasion of enemy territory.26 But even though the multiplication of topographical bureaus meant a decentralization of military cartography, they remained a part of the stationary bureaucratic structure. It was only when war broke out that cartography became mobile. A number of ingénieurs-geographes (topographical engineers) were assigned to the different armies, and their task was to join the avant-garde, to map the terrain, and to supply the commander with their sketches. Given their dangerous position the topographical engineers often were not able to survey the terrain carefully. Instead they drew sketches, or croquis, using a plane table or simply their coup d’oeil. Even though the cartographic language was reformed in France in 1803, when a commission fixed a number of signes conventionels to replace the “semiotic anarchy” of early cartographic notation,27 scientific precision and standardization were subservient to the practical exigencies of war. In 1806 General Berthier, Napoleon’s chief strategist, wrote to Nicolas Antoine Sanson, recently appointed director of the Dépôt de la guerre, “The maps that we are given after the marches and AFTER THE BATTLES are good for nothing. It is essential to have good sketches FROM THE MOMENT THAT the first skirmishers reach enemy territory, so that from such sketches His Majesty may  make his plans for either a battle or something quite different.”28 Berthier’s demand was a response to the more general condition of warfare in an extensive space, as can also be gleaned from a topographical handbook for young officers, published in St. Petersburg in 1801. The author, the cartographer Johann Ludwig Vitzthum von Eckstädt, at one point speaks of the “skoropospešnost’ pri snimanii planov” (the haste of surveying): “Since the lack of time is the decisive factor for troops on the march, it is clear that mapping without a doubt depends more on the art and ability to draw them as effortlessly and quickly as possible than on geometrical precision.”29 Thus the cartographic endeavors were not determined by the projects that had been planned centrally long in advance but by the current movements of the army.

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To make use of the maps that the Dépôt already possessed, Napoleon transformed his personal bureau topographique into a mobile office during the campaigns. Freiherr von Odeleben, who was attached to Napoleon’s headquarters in 1813, writes: When I speak of Napoleon’s office, then I mean the largest or most respectable chamber in whichever building he lodged during a war and that served as a workroom for himself and his secretaries. It seemed to be more important to him than his own private room. If Napoleon bivouacked with the soldiers then a tent was put up adjacent to his for the office and arranged with the utmost precision. In the middle of the room stood a board on which was pasted the best map of the theater of war. In Saxony it was the Petri map, because Napoleon had gotten used to it in 1806 and preferred it above others. [ . . . ] If this map did not lie ready when he arrived, it should be fetched immediately for it constituted his portable home, it seemed to lie closer to his heart than any other needs in life, and at night it was bordered by twenty to thirty candles surrounding the compass in the center. If he mounted his horse, master equerry Caulincourt carried the needed sheet buttoned up inside his vest because he was always in close proximity to Napoleon and could hand it to him when he said: la carte!30

Two wagons transported these maps, and later a lighter cabriolet was added due to its greater speed. Moreover Napoleon’s own wagon was converted into a rolling office: drawers were installed for a small reference library where he would also store reports from Paris. When the drawers were full, superfluous material was cut into pieces and thrown out the window, which, according to Odeleben, could result in a veritable “paper rain.”31 A central concern was thus how to organize the cartographic material in a practical way in order to make it transportable and readily available. The Château de Malmaison, Napoleon’s residence around 1800, holds a collection of maps that illustrates one of the practical measures taken to increase cartographic mobility (Figure 5.3). These maps were prepared by Charles Picquet, who worked as a geographegraveur in Napoleon’s topographical bureau; he glued the maps to a canvas so they could easily be folded and stored in cartons.32 On the basis of these bureaucratic and pragmatic initiatives it is clear that the management of space became one of the key elements of warfare around 1800. And maps were one of the main instruments for this management. Napoleon’s organizational efforts gave rise to an extended cartographic network

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figure 5.3 Charles Picquet’s maps, glued to canvas and stored in cartons, illustrate the practical mea sures taken to orga nize cartographic material and make it more durable and mobile. From Charles Picquet, Géographe-Graveur du Cabinet topographique du S. M. l’Empereur et Roi, “Prusse Méridionale.” National Museum of the Châteaux de Malmaison and Bois-Préau, Inv. MM 40.47.6254. Courtesy of the National Museum of the Châteaux de Malmaison and Bois-Préau.

across Europe through which the maps circulated. Military logistics concerned not only the coordination of armies in space but also the organization, transportation, and management of maps in space. Since the network was highly mobile, it was a very fragile structure. The campaign in Russia in 1812 is a case in point. More maps were produced for this campaign than for any previous one, but since the fronts moved faster than the two supply wagons, there was

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a pervasive shortage of maps. During the disastrous retreat, the wagons that eventually arrived were seized by the Russians. A large number of the maps they contained were originals, and thus Napoleon lost the major part of his cartographic material. A mobile printing press, which Bacler d’Albe brought along from France in order to speed up the copying of sketches, was likewise lost and later taken to St. Petersburg.33 In other words, the space that was represented on the maps often prevented the maps from reaching their destination. Napoleon’s cartographic apparatus makes clear that with regard to military cartography, the map was never better than the bureaucracy that could produce and deliver it. Maps in space were as important as the space of maps.

Scenarios and Virtual Warfare The cartographic apparatus is part of an administrative bureaucracy that precedes the existence of the maps, and whose logistical efforts should ensure that the military was well supplied. But the practical management does not end there. In fact for the commander this is where it begins. While the map for the officer in the field served as a tool of orientation above all, for Napoleon and the generals it was a means of visualizing and managing the future. Baron Fain describes the process: “D’Albe was called whenever the Emperor wanted to read the dispatches on the map; with red and black pins d’Albe marked the sites occupied by our troops; he then highlighted the signs of the most important rivers, mountains, and borders with nuanced colors; finally he prepared the calculations of distance; underlined the scale and opened the compass next to the map. Once the dispatches had been applied to the map in this manner, the Emperor would begin to study it.”34 The map here becomes the central part of an information-transformation system. From the actual world reports are procured in the form of text or numbers that are then immediately visualized with symbols on the map, then a decision is made and dictated to the secretary, who in turn transmits it back to the actual world. The pivot of this information system is the map. The two-dimensional plane, along with the pins and the compass, function as a test field for various hypothetical scenarios. Louis François Lejeune, who served as an aide-de-camp during the wars, writes in his memoirs, “In Prince Berthier’s office, I was always busy tracing the position of our troops in Germany with pins on the maps: the reinforcements on the way, the location of the supplies of food, fodder, shoes; of the artillery and even of the enemy when we could learn of their movements. All these corps were represented in relief by mobile points in various

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colors on the map of Germany, of Tyrol, and of Italy, and they formed a veritable chessboard on which we in turn could play the two sides of the game. This conjectural work prepared us for the more serious operations that we were about to undertake on the terrain.”35 Maps had entered war games specifically for the purpose of training individuals, but in Prince Berthier’s office the map serves a tactical and strategic function as an instrument for the management of the troops in the field. The military map, the instruments of inscription, and the pins came together to form a tool that could produce a plurality of worlds and a plurality of battles—hypothetical ones, to be sure, but battles whose hypothetical management had real-world effects. Following Charles Sanders Peirce, we might say that the connection between cartography, state bureaucracy, the art of war, and geometry around 1800 radically boosted the degree of the “virtuality” of maps. The word virtual comes from the Latin virtus, “strength,” and in 1902 Peirce defined it as follows: “A virtual X [ . . . ] is something, not an X, which has the efficiency (virtus) of an X.”36 The military map functioned as a virtual workspace on which actual data were transformed into simulated alternative scenarios whose strengths and weaknesses were weighed until a strategy was decided upon and transformed back into actuality. The line of information is thus punctuated by a field of virtuality that outstrips the actual in two ways: it creates multiple hypothetical worlds, and the strategy that is developed on the map is an attempt to shape the future. The spatial projection that constitutes the map becomes the basis for a temporal projection of military strategy. Here one should distinguish between the map itself and the activity of working on it. The pins, the compass, the colored pencils together form an operational praxis that makes the map manipulable. Only through the actual practical manipulation of the image—measuring, moving, pointing, inscribing, drawing—do the virtual effects arise. In this way the map as a workspace functions through a transformation of the actual and the virtual. The operational praxis on the symbolic plane generates hypothetical scenarios that in turn have real-world effects. The efficiency of the map arises from this back-and-forth between the practical and the symbolic. Thereby it also becomes clear that the military map contains a latent strategic knowledge that lies hidden within the map. In order to realize this strategic knowledge, to make it manifest, one must first manipulate the map.37 The military map is an unfinished and incomplete object that achieves its objective only in the operational praxis and thereby reaches a provisional completion.

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In the case of military maps the ontological question in the debates about simulations is given a temporal and strategic inflection. Less concerned with questions of mimesis and representation, the map in the strategist’s office or tent becomes the locus for a production of reality. The map is a “fiction,” in Wolfgang Schäffner’s definition of the term, namely a bureaucratic instrument that “does not stand in opposition to the actual, but that [means] the invention of reality.”38 The cartographic apparatus that is formed out of science, bureaucracy, and war around 1800 thus has a fundamentally strategic role. It functions as a workspace on which an amorphous future can be transformed into a limited set of virtual futures, the best of which the commander can seek to actualize. In this function the map had become, as Bacler d’Albe puts it, “absolutely indispensable.”39

Two-Dimensional War: Antoine-Henri Jomini The elective affi nities between maps and military operations are perhaps best illustrated by the theories of Antoine-Henri Jomini. Though Clausewitz would eventually eclipse him, Jomini was by far the most famous military thinker of his day. The author of numerous treatises on strategy and the editor of some thirteen atlases, Jomini developed a theory of war based on maps. Of Swiss origin, he was personally engaged by Napoleon in Mainz on September 28, 1806, as Napoleon was planning his strategy against the Prussian Army. Jomini describes the meeting in his memoirs. Serving at the time under General Ney, he explained that he would first need to return to Ney in order to fetch his horses, then he would catch up with Napoleon in Bamberg. But when Napoleon heard the name of his destination, secret until then, he exclaimed: And who has told you that I am going to Bamberg!! The map, sir! What do you mean, the map? There are hundreds of routes on the map of Germany. Yes, sir, but there is only one that leads the army to the Prussian communication lines and that gives us the opportunity to make them suffer the same fate as Mack at Ulm: and that is why I am convinced that Your Majesty will take it. Napoleon, stupefied by this strategic judgment, said to the young officer: Well then, that’s fine, be in Bamberg in four days, but don’t say a word to anyone, not even Berthier, for he has no clue that I am going to Bamberg.40

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Ever complacent, Jomini probably invented the anecdote,41 but it illustrates his cartographic approach to the art of war. In the Napoleonic period one must prepare the maneuvers “in the silence of the office while studying the map.”42 For Jomini the map is not merely an auxiliary aid in the management of war but its primary location. As he sums up in the Précis de l’art de la guerre, “Strategy is the art of waging war upon the map.”43 Accordingly the three scientific principles that compose Jomini’s theory of war were developed directly from the map: the art of orga nizing the operational maneuvers in the most advantageous manner, the art of bringing the individual corps as quickly as possible to their destination, and the art of combining them simultaneously on the single, decisive point of the battlefield.44 Following these principles the theater of operations is divided into three general sectors or zones: “one on the right, one on the left, and one in the center.” Of these three, one will always be suited for the attainment of the military objective, one will be less advantageous, and the third will present too large obstacles.45 These obstacles consist of the positions of the enemy and the geography of the country, and every strategic and tactical decision can thus be boiled down to the question of “whether you should maneuver to the right, to the left, or directly ahead. The selection between three simple alternatives cannot, surely, be considered an enigma worthy of a modern sphinx.”46 Not, that is, if one has a good map at hand. Mapmaker and military thinker in one, Jomini presents a cartographic military theory in which the art of war consists in the organization of the terrain into strategic and tactical zones and the management of this space on the map. For Jomini the outcome of wars is therefore directly dependent not only on the possession and the quality of maps; it is also determined by the cartographically derived principles.47 Developed on the basis of Napoleon’s campaigns, Jomini’s theory of war was born out of the media technology that Napoleon propagated and to whose expansion Jomini himself contributed. At the same time, however, the imposition of strategic zones onto maps often led Jomini to think war as an abstract spatial choreography, where the imposition of forms takes precedence over actual topography. As illustrated in Figure 5.4, maneuvers are determined by topology rather than by topography. In other words, it is the spatial relations between the various military units and not the obstacles and affordances of the terrain that decide Jomini’s strategic plans.

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figure 5.4 Jomini’s strategic zone map illustrates his cartographically inflected theory of war, in which the abstract spatial choreography takes precedence over the actual terrain. From Antoine-Henri Jomini, Précis de l’art de la guerre ou nouveau tableau analytique des principales combinaisons de la stratégie, de la grande tactique et de la politique militaire (Osnabrück: Biblio Verlag, 1973). Reprint of the Paris edition from 1855. © Biblio Verlag.

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His fascination with the new possibilities for the management of space frequently lures him toward an even greater level of abstraction, where the map becomes a featureless, empty plane, on which the grandes opérations can be thought out untroubled by the detailed, topographical indications of the terrain that complicate the internal relations between military units.48 Where the improvements in military mapping during the period had tightened the referential link between the map and the territory and thereby transformed the map into a useful tool for the management of space, the power of the instrumental function here makes Jomini forget that its guarantee lies in the strength of its referential element. Later in his career, after he had read Clausewitz, Jomini withdrew from some of his more radical statements and acknowledged that concrete circumstances would often hinder the implementation of tactics and strategy even when they were based on immutable principles. Nevertheless Jomini’s theory of war was shaped by the instrumental possibilities of military cartography to such an extent that he occasionally forgot that the map is not the territory, that the hypothetical scenarios performed on the map are efficient only if the referential link remains intact. With his excessive focus on the map itself and its instrumental possibilities, the case of Jomini best illustrates the extent to which warfare was increasingly becoming a matter of media and how the theory of war was given a cartographic inflection. The historical record appears to bear this out. On August 14, 1813, dissatisfied with his position in the Grande Armée, Jomini deserted and headed toward Prague in order to join Alexander and enter Russian service. But before he left he had his copper plates and sketches retrieved from the engraver’s workshop, and the finished maps were smuggled out by an assistant. Shifting allegiance from one empire to another, Jomini made sure to bring with him the representations that sustained them. Four days later Napoleon wrote to his minister of war that Jomini “will be tried, convicted and executed in absentia.”49

Cartographic Literacy In spite of its new mathematical foundation, military cartography across Europe was haunted by inaccuracies. In Prussia, for example, where triangulation commenced only in 1797, artillery lieutenant Johann Christopher von Textor wrote in April 1800, “All maps that have been produced in Prussia can only be regarded as scraps without the least accuracy; for real measurements and observations only began three years ago.”50 Maps therefore had to be carefully read. According to Textor’s fellow Prussian officer Johann Georg Lehmann,

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cartographic literacy was not a given but an important military skill that needed to be learned, “for if even the best maps become dangerous objects in the hands of the strategist who does not know how to read and use them, how much more the bad ones that can lead even the most skilled officer astray if he does not know how to check them.”51 Lehmann, who invented a more precise method of depicting incline, therefore developed a technique for proofing maps and a technique for reading them. The first consists in checking the internal consistency of the relation between incline and altitude markers. If, for example, from point A a steep incline to the top of a mountain is followed on the other side by a less steep decline toward point B, and if points A and B are equidistant from the top, then point B must be higher than point A. When proofing various maps, however, Lehmann found that they rarely displayed this internal consistency: “From the Acher by Burg, which certainly lies a lot higher than Lent or even Zinndorf, you ascend steeply to a very high point and then descend only little to a point that lies lower than where you started. How is that possible?”52 Indeed. Proofreading a map, however, tests only its accuracy. Using the map for military purposes requires a cartographic literacy of a different kind. So as not to fall prey to an optical illusion, the officer must be able to construct the limited perspectival field of vision of any given point on the panoptic aperspectival map. The map of the area around Ober-Wiesenberg provides an example (Figure 5.5). On the slanting line from G to F Lehmann imagines a soldier standing between point h and point g; then he tries to construct the field of vision along the line. Below the map he has drawn both line and terrain in profile. He explains, “For the man standing upright at point s only the ground between i and l, between e and d and between l and u is visible, the rest is covered. [ . . . ] This clarification of the fields of vision on a map would be of great use for those officers who easily fall into the trap of thinking that they can see the ground from the ground itself, just as they can see it on the map. Many of them will surely be astonished by the limitation of the field of vision from the summits from which one would think that much if not everything is visible if it were not for the geometrical examination.”53 For the soldier lines of sight are also lines of fire, and Lehmann’s technique is therefore essential for tactical dispositions. As with the development of the optimal strategy, we see here how the map contains more information than it displays. Reading a map around 1800 was a practical endeavor, a visual manipulation of the image in order to realize the latent knowledge that is only invisibly present. The reading metaphor

Lehmann’s map of the area around Ober-Wiesenberg, which provides the basis for his attempt to improve cartographic literacy in the military. From Johann Georg Lehmann, Der Plan der Gegend um OberWiesenberg, in Die Lehre der Situations-Zeichnung oder Anweisung zum richtigen Erkennen und genauen Abbilden der Erd-Oberfläche in topographischen Charten und SituationsPlanen (Dresden: Arnoldischen Buch- und Kunsthandlung, 1816), Table 16. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Kartenabteilung.

figure 5.5

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therefore needs to be specified. Cartographic literacy in the military sense does not consist in a mostly passive scanning of letters or symbols. Reading a military map is an operational praxis that consists in an active visual manipulation that generates new knowledge. And this skill, according to Lehmann, “shall be the constant study of regents and commanders, of the officers of the general staff and the rest of the leading officers. Without this knowledge nobody can form a correct judgment on any military-political action [ . . . ] and therefore cannot dare to look into the future.”54 In short, the cartographic apparatus around 1800 consists not only of the maps themselves and the bureaucratic network that produced and circulated them but also of a set of personal skills, the cartographic literacy that allowed officers to test and manipulate the maps. The symbolic test, however, is only half the exercise. Going into the field the officer should seek to develop his “tactical visual judgment.”55 Building on his purely “geometric-physical” visual judgment that gives a subjective judgment of distance, height, and depth, the officer should seek to estimate how many troops of various kinds the terrain can hold, how it presents advantages and obstacles, what expenditure of time and energy it requires, and so on. While doing so he should constantly compare the map with the terrain, bringing the representation and the represented into a relationship of complete equivalence such that he learns to see the map in the terrain and vice versa and is eventually able “to wage war on the map just as on the ground, and on the ground just as on the map.”56 This tactical visual judgment in turn serves as the foundation for the third and last kind, the “strategic visual judgment,” whereby the commander chooses the optimal terrain for military operations and maneuvers.57 The method is once again the comparison of maps, now small-scale maps, with the actual terrain.58 The necessity of these abilities—to test and read maps, to evaluate the terrain from a tactical or strategic perspective— thus creates a particular kind of subject, one who understands the epistemic and instrumental character of military cartography and is also able to transform symbolic representations into an advantageous orga nization of actual space. But the impact of cartography on the military subject is even greater in the absence of maps. When the intermediary between the terrain and the subject is lacking, the officer himself should be mediatized. He should develop the ability to bypass the map and himself project triangles and other geometrical figures directly onto the terrain. As Allent writes in the “Essai sur les

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reconnaissances militaires,” it is an “ingenious art which consists in inscribing regular figures into all the composite figures with the mind: the sequence of principal figures forms an imaginary canvas for the observer which guides him during the reconnaissance.”59 The officer internalizes the forms of cartographic representation in order to project them directly from the mind. In Berenhorst’s words, the inside of his skull must be “wallpapered with maps,” for this will transform the terrain itself into a legible and manageable mental map. Thus the actual map is replaced by its mental counterpart, by, as Clausewitz would later say, an “internally drawn map,” which is the product of an act of the imagination. For only “that cognitive power called the imagination” can make the image stick in the mind in such a way that “the individual elements do not fall apart.”60 Where the canvas of a map constitutes the foundation for the various representations, the imagination serves as the mental canvas that sustains and keeps in place all the spatial notations. The wars thus require the development of a cartographic subject, of a person who, in the absence of actual maps, can read the terrain as he reads a map because he is able to organize space using the methods of cartography. When Wittgenstein notes that it is quite possible for someone who knows the ins and outs of a city to draw a map of it that is “totally wrong,” he points to the difference between two distinct orders of space: experiential or lived space, on the one hand, and space as a symbolic construction, on the other.61 The cartographic subject around 1800, who must be able to move effortlessly from one order of space to the other, is therefore a product of training. In the military discourse, Lehmann’s visual judgment is most often referred to as the coup d’oeil; as both designations indicate, it requires a visual training, a schooling of the eye. In practice this means that the officer must become well acquainted with geodetic operations, measurement practices, and maps, as well as all the various kinds of terrain. Repeatedly comparing maps with the terrain, the officer’s “eye is corrected and gradually acquires precision; and in the rays it projects, sight, having been trained in this fashion, seems to have a hand which it extends on to the objects.”62 Extending its spectral hands onto the terrain, the eye can thus learn to manage space to its advantage, but as with the tact of judgment this ability must become a subconscious habit if it is to be effective, for in war “during those reconnaissances in which time, the general, the enemy permit no more than a coup d’oeil, all is lost if the officer reflects; the moment for action passes while he deliberates.”63 As a subconscious “habit of seeing,”64 the coup d’oeil can be regarded as the visual counterpart

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to the tact of judgment. Clausewitz’s emphasis on the moral aspects of war leads him in On War to criticize the writers who conceive of the coup d’oeil as a function solely of the physical eye. Instead it is more often “the mental eye that is meant by the coup d’oeil.” Like tact the coup d’oeil is a concept that links space with epistemology. But where the emphasis in the tact of judgment is on contingent events in space, in the coup d’oeil it is on the nature of space itself. In both instances, however, the military subject is the anchor point for the formation and training of spatial knowledge. With his visual projection of a tactical space, the military subject develops empirically and practically the form of cognition that Kant had come to regard as the substratum of our experience of space. As Franco Farinelli has shown, Kant’s teachings on geography found their way into his later critical period.65 Moving from empirical geography to the geography of reason, Kant begins to measure “the obscure spaces of our own mind,” and toward the end of The Critique of Pure Reason he recommends his readers “to throw another glance at the map of the country that we are about to leave behind.”66 As in the later Anthropology, reason is described cartographically, but Farinelli goes further and suggests that Kant transfers the Ptolemaic map projection to his analysis of reason, such that reason itself is conceived as the point of origin of a projection: “The Ptolemaic point G [the projection point] is nothing other than pure reason, and Kant’s first Critique is the cartographic description of the projection.”67 In the military discourse around the Napoleonic Wars, this transcendental capacity is transformed from a condition of possibility for the perception of space into an empirical, instrumental skill for the management of the terrain. And where Kant’s transcendental projection originates in an innate faculty, the officers’ projections are the product of a sustained cartographic training.68 If, with Kant, the subject’s perception is conceived in terms of a cartographic technique, with the Napoleonic Wars perception is transformed into an efficient tactical and strategic instrument.

Media Warfare Up through the nineteenth century and continuing in the twentieth, warfare would increasingly become an affair of media. Long-distance management with the aid of telegraphs and radios would replace what Stefan Kaufmann calls the “optical-acoustic presence” of the commander on the battlefield, the method of waging war until around 1800.69 The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars mark the beginning of this transition. For the first time warfare was suff used

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by a media technology that transferred spatial management onto the symbolic plane. The effect, however, was not a turn away from the real. Rather the goal was greater control over the empirical world. The administrative bureaucracy, the simulations, the operational manipulations became part of a spatial praxis in which maps were managed in various ways in order to extract the greatest effects from them. This virtual, that is, real efficiency was not lost on the other warring nations of Europe, and it resulted in a media armament during and after the wars. Following the lead of the French, Emperor Pavel I of Russia, for example, devoted himself to the improvement of the cartographic situation immediately upon his ascension to the throne. Most maps from the eighteenth century had not been preserved, and he therefore founded the Drawing Room in 1796, followed by the Imperatorskoe Depo Kart (Imperial Map Depot) the year after.70 In 1811 the Mekhanicheskaia Masterskaia (Engineering Workshop) was founded to make mathematical instruments for the production of maps, and various educational institutions were established during this period to properly train officers in the practical skills of mapmaking.71 In Prussia Frederick II had written in his military testament from 1768 that a corps of topographical engineers should be founded, but it did not come into existence until 1790, under Friedrich Wilhelm II,72 and as late as 1806 Rühle von Lilienstern complained that military mapping was insufficiently institutionalized and requested that a “bureau topographie [sic]” be established in the Prussian Army following the example set by France, such that the advantages of cartographic knowledge would not be dependent on the random efforts of individual officers.73 In other words, parallel to the military struggle, to warfare proper, there emerged a knowledge war, a conflict over symbolic representations. The sentence “A detailed map is a weapon of war” has been ascribed to Napoleon, and while it is probably apocryphal,74 the bureaucratic measures show that this was fully the way maps were perceived and used. Ideally the doubling of space should facilitate the conquest of enemy territory, but the opposite was also the case: invasion allowed for the conquest of the enemy’s maps. Entering Berlin in 1806, the French Army found maps and copper plates belonging to the military academy of Berlin in the collections of various merchants, and General Sanson ordered them packed along with most of the Prussian map collection and sent to the Dépôt de la guerre.75 The favor was returned first by the Russians in 1812 and then by the Prussians and Austrians, who emptied the Dépôt in 1814.76 The latter were less fortunate, however, for most of the important

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maps that had not perished in 1812 or 1813 were now on Elba. Forced into exile, Napoleon had taken them with him.77 Actual and symbolic warfare could no longer be separated. In this perspective it is only natural that military maps would enter international legal discourse. At this time it became customary to include articles on cartographic material in the peace agreements. For example, Article XXXI of the Paris peace treaty of May 30, 1814, stipulates that all maps confiscated by the French armies while they were on foreign soil must be handed over to the allied powers. These maps should be returned “together with the land.”78 Cartographic claims are treated on par with territorial claims, and as the hostilities had taken place both in empirical space as well as in symbolic space, so a peace must be made in both of them. With the treaties the military map acquires a legal status. Once again maps would travel through the space they represented, but now as legal objects. The national management of military maps came to an end with the international legislation that proceeded from the peace negotiations.

Cartographic Chronotopes Where the complex cartographic apparatus around 1800 comprises various material, bureaucratic, political, practical, and legal elements, the maps themselves form a representational spectrum that runs from the ideal map to the actual map that could feasibly be produced in difficult circumstances. In 1803 General Allent distinguished the two extremes and the enormous distance between them: on the one hand the map that is produced on a scientific basis with the aid of several orders of triangulation and that requires much art, time, and money, as well as the control of the territory; on the other hand the map that can be made under the influence of circumstances, that is, taking into consideration the actual state of the technical, financial, and military possibilities.79 Lehmann’s rules for the meticulous testing of internal consistency primarily concerned maps in the first category, engraved maps based on meticulous surveys conducted with the most recent scientific methods. The second category, however, consists of the above-mentioned sketches, or croquis.80 Compared to the printed maps these sketches present a very different cartographic space. Fragmentary, rough, discontinuous, they provide an image of the reality of military cartography, of the impact of the state of war on mapping itself. The conditions for the mapping operations thus generate two very different visual images. Within the framework developed by the Russian critic

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Mikhail Bakhtin, one can here speak of two cartographic chronotopes, two different ways of representing the relation between time and space.

Fragments of Space-Time Often lacking maps of contested foreign territories, the commanders had to rely instead on reconnaissance sketches produced on the spot. As the British cartographer and military historian William Siborne writes, the military sketch is “a hurried and imperfect delineation of the general character and most important features of a country” and “dashed off with all the rapidity which the most practised skill can command.”81 While accuracy was still important, the main objective was to obtain sufficient spatial knowledge for the commander to make his tactical dispositions. The reconnaissance sketches should therefore not “devolve into micrology,” as Karl von Decker, the director of one of the Prussian topographical bureaus, puts it.82 Often the conditions would automatically hinder unnecessary detail, for under enemy fire there was time only to take down the key features of the terrain, and to minimize danger reconnaissance was frequently undertaken during the night. The better part of these sketches has probably been lost because they were intended for the moment and subsequently had little value. Nevertheless some have been preserved.83 The map collection in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin holds a remarkable compilation of fragile sketch maps drawn during the French invasion of Russia in 1812.84 The maps were collected by the Saxon captain Ferdinand Heinrich August von Larisch after the war and described in four handwritten pages that bear the title “Entwurf zur Bearbeitung einer Charte des Kriegsschauplatzes des 7ten Armeekorps—das ist, der Königl. Sächsischen Truppen 1812 in Polen” (Outline for the Editing of a Map That Depicts the Theater of War of the 7th Army Corps—viz. the Royal Saxon Troops in 1812 in Poland).85 In 1796 Larisch had entered the cadet corps in Dresden, where Johann Georg Lehmann began to teach in 1798 and aroused Larisch’s interest in cartography.86 During the Napoleonic Wars he was active as a topographer and sapper, performing military surveys for German and Austrian topographical bureaus, and he supplied several generals with cartographic material, among them General Reynier and General Berthier. With his outline Larisch intended to piece together the many separate fragments to form a single detailed and continuous map. For this purpose he collected a number of original sketches that he and various other soldiers in the regiment had drawn. Since the material had been lying around on floorboards

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for several years, many of the sketches are either torn or damaged in other ways. Nevertheless a good portion is fairly well preserved. As is well known, the Saxon and Austrian troops were allied with the French against Russia, and most of the sketches were made in the early phase of the campaign during the advance into Russia on the right wing of the French main force in the summer and fall of 1812. Altogether the collection consists of eighty-six so-called reconnaissance sketches, drawings, reductions, and copies at different scales that depict convoy roads and the terrain of current-day Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine. The army possessed a few small-scale general maps of these territories, for example David Gilly’s Special-Karte von Südpreußen (1802–1803) and Friedrich Leopold von Schrötter’s Karte von Ost-Preussen nebst Preussisch Litthauen und West-Preussen nebst dem Netzdistrict (1802), both in a scale of 1:150,000. But they lacked detailed large-scale maps for military purposes, and the military topographers were forced to develop an operative spatial knowledge on a daily basis.87 As Johann Franz Ploedterl’s reconnaissance sketch from August 29, 1812 shows (Figure 5.6), the main concern is the indication of the possibilities for the movement of troops and equipment: bridges, roads, morasses, and bodies of water constitute the elements of a vectorial space that either affords or hinders movement. A central task of the military leadership was to find a way through these obstacles, through the “terrain chicanes,” as Rühle von Lilienstern called it, and to ensure the mobility of the army.88 In charge of both the topographers and the sappers and miners, Larisch was not only occupied with the symbolic construction of this vectorial space; he also contributed to its realization by building, repairing, and destroying bridges and roads. Accordingly Ploedterl’s written commentary on the sketch mainly describes the number of the bridges and their condition: whether the enemy has transformed a path into an obstacle course and what alternative lines of advance the troops might follow. As the representation of a vectorial space, the sketches offer a visual history of the campaign, a history that unfolds narratively. For today’s historian as well as for the soldiers themselves, the visualization of the terrain occurs gradually. The perspective is situated in both space and time. From day to day the cartographers of the 7th Army corps extended their limited spatial knowledge by way of new reconnaissances. They were by no means possessed of a panoptic overview, only of a series of spatial fragments that slowly, in small increments carved a visible course through the darkness of their topographical ignorance.

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figure 5.6 Reconnaissance sketch drawn by Johann Franz Ploedterl, August 29, 1812. Johann Franz Ploedterl, “Recognoscirung den 29. August 1812.” Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Kartenabteilung, V 31167.

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The map of Wielka Wieś, or Velikoe Selo (in southern Poland near Cracow), to Kobryn in present-day Belarus consists of four individual sketches that have subsequently been glued together, probably by Larisch, in order to visualize the marches of the troops (Figure 5.7). Judging from the inscriptions and the diverging orientation of the sketches, they were produced one after the other in August 1812. After the march represented on the first sketch, the next sketch represents the second march, on August 11, and the third sketch in turn depicts the march on August 12. In this way the space of potential and actual operations is mapped step by step, or march by march. The cartographic space was not given; it did not exist beforehand. Rather the construction of this space goes hand in hand with the movement of the soldiers on the ground.89 The sketches thus belong to a peculiar cartographic category. We might best describe them as conditioned maps, maps on which the specific circumstances strongly impact their form. The sketches fall into this category because, besides representing the terrain and the temporary position of the troops, they also, in an oblique fashion, display a more elusive content. In addition to villages, rivers, and bridges, the sketches depict the historical event of the mapping process itself. Out of the cracks and scratches, the errors, inaccuracies, and conjectures appears a cartographic image of the state of war, of the conditions of wartime mapping.90 Particular to the sketches is thus their spatiotemporal relation, that is, their specific chronotope. In his analysis of representational forms in the novel, Bakhtin coins the term to designate the intrinsic connectedness between time and space.91 Not a transcendental aesthetic like Kant’s, Bakhtin’s representational aesthetic concerns the forms of artistic expression in literature.92 Bakhtin writes of the novel and its formal constituents, not cartography, but the Larisch sketches might appear in a different light if we think about the chronotopicity of military cartography.93 In literature, Bakhtin notes, the “primary category in the chronotope is time,”94 but since on maps the primary category is space, the cartographic representation of time is particularly interesting.95 If we consider the Larisch sketches from this point of view, we see that they constitute a unique cartographic chronotope because they invert the spatiotemporal relationship that usually obtains on maps. On the sketches time is not subjected to space; rather space is temporalized. Inseparable from the moment in which they were produced, they display the process of mapping itself. On engraved maps this process is often relegated to the invenit and sculpsit outside of the cartographic space itself, as on Sterne’s narrative

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figure 5.7 The Saxon and Austrian pursuit of the Russian avant-garde from Wielka Wieś, or Velikoe Selo (in southern Poland near Cracow), to Kobryn in present-day Belarus, August 10–13, 1812. The sketches were drawn one at a time and subsequently glued together. By Ferdinand Heinrich August von Larisch. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Kartenabteilung, V 31167.

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map of Tristram Shandy. The processual praxis that brought the map into being is thereby hidden in the finished product. On the military sketch, however, it forms an integral part of the map itself. In order to make tactical movements and dispositions possible, a new space had to be constructed every single day, and the sketches, or in German Skizzen, that is, the products of an ex tempore activity (Gr.: skhedios), display the historical and contingent circumstances that condition the production of representational space. In this way the Saxon cartographers mapped a previously unfamiliar road from Saxony to Belarus in the matter of a few months.96 The processual, narrative aspect of the many fragmentary maps in the collection emerges from the fact that they constitute separate links in a broken chain that can subsequently be organized along a timeline and that the military topographers mapped only the elements that from their own situated perspective opened a potential space of movement. The convoy roads mostly run off into the nothingness of the white areas that represent both the invisible as well the tactically unimportant. Louis Marin has suggested that the printed, completed map constitutes a matrix of all possible movements.97 The sketches, however, constitute one actual, gradually unfolding movement: from Saxony to Belarus and back. The Larisch sketches tell the story of their own making, whereby mapping and map converge. When Larisch was not on reconnaissance, he often drew copies of the sketches on transparent wax paper and distributed them. Once the commander had simulated the various possible dispositions on the sketches, the tactics to be realized, his orders, could be inscribed directly on the sketch and distributed among the officers. As Figure 5.8 shows, the orders were also copied (e.g., “Halt until the signal is given”). Where the sketch or the finished map formed the basis of a simulation of possible actions, the wax paper copies became the medium for the distribution and implementation of a spatial management. The global circulation of printed maps through the channels of Napoleon’s cartographic bureaucracy has its counterpart in the local circulation of spatial fragments throughout the individual army corps. Just as Napoleon with the Dépôt de la guerre, the topographical offices in his residences, and his own mobile bureau topographique collected cartographic material, Larisch’s superior, General Reynier, collected the sketches “in order to make one single map out of the entire material.”98 At both the macro and the micro level the management of military maps is a product of the interaction between centralization and mobility.

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figure 5.8 Wax paper copy of a reconnaissance sketch. The order “Halt until the signal is given” has also been copied. By Ferdinand Heinrich August von Larisch. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Kartenabteilung, V 31167.

In 1831 Larisch himself also attempted to put together a single map. Out of the cartographic jigsaw puzzle of sketches, copies, and reductions he produced “a map of several cubits which depicts the march of the Prince Friedrich August Regiment in the Polish Campaign in 1812 with an indication of the calendar days on which the troops found themselves here or there.”99 Not until 1863 did he present the finished map to the Saxon Ministry of War.100 The map measures 240 by 47 centimeters and represents the regiment’s marching quarters from March 27 to May 12, 1812.101 Even if Larisch, in a comment on

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the map itself, warns against ascribing it too great a historical or topographical significance, he still believes that it represents “the most detailed record of the regiment’s 2nd Musketeer Battalion on the march from March 27 until May 12, 1812, in one of the only campaigns that the Saxon military was involved in . . . and it can actually be regarded as the route travelled by the entire Royal Saxon Corps.”102 The solved puzzle, the result of Larisch’s cumbersome efforts at compilation, is at once the summa of all the fragmented sketches as well as their starkest contrast, for in the conversion of disparate sketch maps of various scales into the unified, coherent overview map, both the process of military mapping and its characteristic representational forms disappear. The situated, perspectival, rough, improvised, and often hurried but still useful and effective shaping of space is transformed into a panoptic overview map whose gain in clarity is paid with the loss of the reality of military mapping. And this spatial transformation has as its correlate a transformation of cartographic time: events that open into an invisible and indeterminate future are converted into a fi xed historical representation. No longer a tool for the management of hypothetical tactical scenarios, the final product of Larisch’s great efforts seeks a visualization of the past. Instead of possible futures—history.

Techno-Aesthetics and the Battle of Marengo In the official use of cartography, the effects that arise from the manipulation of the chronotopic relation were fully exploited. Following his famous victory in the Battle of Marengo in 1800, Napoleon ordered the topographical engineers to map the entire campaign in Piedmont. The result is an aesthetic marvel, the Carte Générale des Marches, Positions, Combats et Batailles de l’Armée de Réserve, depuis le paßage du Grand St. Bernhard, le 24 Floréal, An 8 jusqu’ à la Victoire complette et décisive remporté à Marengo le 25 Prairial suivant (General Map of the Marches, Positions, Combats and Battles of the Army of the Reserve, from the Passage of the Grand St. Bernhard on 24 Floréal, Year 8 Until the Complete and Decisive Victory Won at Marengo on the Following 25 Prairial; Figure 5.9). Napoleon had used a map in nineteen sheets for the tactical preparations for the final assault,103 but this small-scale map in eight sheets depicts a much larger area, as well as the temporal sequence of the entire campaign. At the bottom right the legend explains that the narrative unfolds in forty-five distinct events, from the French Army traversing the Great St. Bernard Pass through a series of maneuvers and battles to the final victory at Marengo. Where

Small-scale map of Napoleon’s campaign in Piemonte. Carte Générale des Marches, Positions, Combats et Batailles de l’Armée de Réserve, depuis le paßage du Grand St. Bernhard, le 24 Floréal, An 8 jusqu’ à la Victoire complette et décisive remporté à Marengo le 25 Prairial suivant. By Pierre Lapis, 1803. Harvard Map Collection, Harvard University.

figure 5.9

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on Larisch’s sketches space is temporalized, this officially sanctioned map spatializes time as it compresses the events of a full month into a single static image. With both the beginning and the end of the campaign clearly demarcated in space, the multiplicity of future contingents that at any given point during the campaign made up the future are excluded. Instead the possible futures as well as the multiplicity of actual events that eventually came to constitute the campaign are transformed into the single narrative thread that weaves its way across the map following a predetermined path. The red thread that originally served as a mark of authenticity in the ropes of the British Army and subsequently made its way into narrative theory as the connecting ideas of a story, here visually joins together all forty-five major events in space. The limited perspective of the sketches gives way to the aperspectival cartographic omniscience whose completeness is indicated by the frame. All events pertinent to the campaign are represented; nothing unforeseen can occur since everything can be seen. The frame thus constitutes the edge and outer limit of a historical world, a world whose events are completely contained within the visual borders of the map. There is no outside-map, so to speak, and thus there is no outside-event. Time and contingency are either cast in a spatial form or they are blocked out by the frame. The singularity of this chronotope consists in the fact that by spatializing time it represents historical time while suspending historicity. Thereby the purpose of the map changes. Both the referential function and the historical function are overwhelmed by its symbolic function. In accordance with Bachelard’s dictum “The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it,”104 the viewer is meant to see neither the territory nor the historical quest of the French Army but a display of sovereign power—the power of Napoleon to bend time and space according to his will. With its spatialization of time this chronotope thus gives rise to a second-order representation whose power is enhanced by techno-aesthetics. With the symmetrical legends—the matrix of events on the right side and the picturesque view of the Alps on the left—the alignment of four different scales, a display of the French Army arraigned in perfect order, and the hand-colored terrain, the mapmaker has turned war into a work of art. Napoleon’s campaign is not merely related as a historical event; it is grounded by the science of mapping and the beauty of the product.105 War is ugly, but truth is beauty and beauty truth, and well aware of this the mapmakers have surreptitiously created a visual argument for the entire campaign. Underneath, or rather in and through the

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representation of a given time and space emerges, by means of the fusion of technology and aesthetics, a second-order representation: the glorification of Napoleon’s control over time and space. While the temporal element of this chronotope is organized by its spatial element, they are both enlisted to serve the overarching symbolic function. A milestone in Napoleon’s meteoric rise to power, the Battle of Marengo would soon be transformed into a discursive event. For the five-year anniversary Napoleon requested an official account of the battle. The Relation de la Bataille de Marengo (Account of the Battle of Marengo) was composed by General Berthier, Napoleon’s chief strategist. In this text the referential and practical aspects of maps are completely eliminated as the map itself becomes the object of a representation and a component in the self-fashioning of the empire. The account opens with an illustration of Napoleon by Carle Vernet (Figure 5.10). His back to the battlefield, Napoleon gestures toward the map held by Berthier himself. The spatial inscriptions on the map are partly hidden and barely visible, and the map here signifies one thing only: itself. The referential power is taken over by pure self-referentiality as it points to its own existence: “I am a map.” Not the source but the object of a representation, the referential function is sucked out of the map, but this is compensated for by the symbolic function it takes on in conjunction with Napoleon’s gesture. Disregarding the actual battlefield behind him, Napoleon looks to the map to make his tactical dispositions and thus turns the map into the image of military control par excellence. Ideally the battle will be decided in advance by the decisions made on the map, and the subsequent events will merely serve as an illustration and verification of the cartographically ordered dispositions. In this way the battle is over before it begins. As an illustration of the text, Vernet’s drawing is well chosen, for Berthier’s history of the battle is informed by a similar understanding. The events on the battlefield appear to have a real temporal quality and to be open to unpredicted developments, but such contingency is illusory: “The enemy’s maneuver evidently strove to attack our front line from behind, which could be decisive for the Austrian army. But B O N A P A R T E had already conceived of a battle plan that thwarted this dangerous maneuver, and, from ten o’clock in the morning all the movements of the day had been decided in his mind.”106 The chaos of the Austrian Army thus bears witness to “the profundity and skill of the pre-determined dispositions.”107 Possessed of a complete spatial overview with his map, Napoleon is, in Berthier’s account, also endowed with a corresponding view of the future, the foresight that allows him to de-

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figure 5.10 Napoleon on the battlefield of Marengo. In Vernet’s illustration, the map is itself an object of representation. From Louis-Alexandre Berthier, Relation de la Bataille de Marengo (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1805), 9. Widener Library, Harvard University.

termine the course of a complex series of events in advance. For Napoleon the future course of a battle is just as visible as the terrain on the map in front of him. In the early official depiction of Napoleon, the map becomes a representational object and thereby a symbol of military control; its spatial order also comes to structure that discourse: the future is contingent, unpredictable,

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uncertain only for those who are equipped neither with a map nor with a Napoleon. Conversely the readers’ comprehension of the past is dependent on its spatial organization, for in order to understand the strategic maneuvers preceding the Battle of Marengo, it is necessary “to follow the development of B O N A P A R T E’s project carefully on the map at the moment when it reaches its great result.” His plan “was not simply to vanquish the enemy, but to cut off his line of retreat and to compel a capitulation that forced him to return all areas of Italy at once.”108 The scope and complexity of such a plan are visible only on the maps of the campaign and of the final battle subsequently produced by the topographical engineers and included at the end. The referential element thus returns, but now as a means of gaining insight into Napoleon’s military strategy. Thus the text comes full circle: when the cartographic management of the future has become a future past, it can be comprehended only cartographically. On the five-year anniversary of the battle, Berthier would thus, on the battlefield itself, present to Napoleon the map of the past, the Relation de la Bataille de Marengo, in which he himself is depicted presenting to Napoleon the map of the future five years earlier. As with Clausewitz’s probability theory, the cartographic apparatus around 1800 was developed in an attempt to domesticate and control the hazardous empire of war. That is, it sought to minimize chance by shrinking the empire with a spatial technology. With hitherto unseen cartographic efforts, Napoleon propagated a knowledge order that soon migrated to other areas.109 It is during the first half of the nineteenth century that we witness the beginning of thematic and statistical mapping,110 but already during Napoleon’s reign the Dépôt de la guerre produced a number of administrative atlases of France. The first one was printed in 1805 and bore the title Atlas de toutes les divisions administratives et militaires de l’Empire (Atlas of All the Administrative and Military Divisions of the Empire).111 The judicial and financial institutions, the police, the prisons, the population, the universities, the production of sugar, syrups, and grain, the price of wheat, and more, all were orga nized cartographically.112 Maps quickly found numerous applications and soon became a standard tool for the management of data. But they also show up elsewhere. With his cartographic enterprise, Napoleon might be said to have instituted a discourse on military maps. During the nineteenth century the military map becomes a discursive object whose representational virtues and vices are critically examined by works of litera-

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ture. As the discourse on siege warfare is subjected to critical scrutiny by Sterne in the eighteenth century, the realist novel of the nineteenth century takes the Napoleonic Wars as one of its important but unwieldy subjects and, mutatis mutandis, interrogates its discourse. Here the map takes the role of the siege model, for it is against the background of the cartographic enterprise that the novel develops its own conception of the state of war. A medium within a medium, the military map generates a metareflection on the representability of war, on the very possibility of its symbolic representation. In the complex relation between cartography and narrative, the state of war emerges as a persistent problem throughout the century.

6

KL The Poetics of War Cartography and the Realist Novel

verything happens on a battlefield in a way that totally transcends our imagination and our powers of description.”1 Articulated by Nikolay Rostov in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, this claim presents one of the main challenges to the nineteenth-century novel, namely the representability of warfare. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, which had left such a profound imprint on European history, seemed at the same time to evade description, to mark a hole in the textual fabric of history. In the attempt to conceptualize the wars, the literary imagination was faced not with a simple object but with an entire matrix of events and relations that could not easily be transformed into text. As Tolstoy suggests, the scope and complexity of the wars were of a scale that appeared to exceed the possibilities of novelistic representation. For the main authors of the nineteenth century who treat warfare not merely as a background setting but as one of their protagonists, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars provoke a metareflection, a quasi-transcendental inquiry into the limits and possibilities of literary representation. The wars, in other words, force the novel to reflect on its own conditions of possibility. The metadiscourse on representability is fueled by the emergence of the cartographic apparatus during the wars. The map presents a different medium

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for the depiction and management of war, a medium that has other representational virtues and vices. Maps therefore enter literary texts not primarily as a tool of spatial orientation but as an alternate symbolic form that itself becomes an object of inquiry. When the novel delineates the features of its own poetics, it takes place against the foil of cartography.2 Thus not just the wars but also its media have an extended afterlife. As the literary imagination grapples with the past, it inherits the same difficulties that beleaguered military commanders, for now, beyond managing the extension of space, the realm of contingent events, and the complex operative logic of war, authors had to create everything from scratch. This chapter examines how the state of war is conceived later in the nineteenth century as it becomes tied up with the poetics of the novel.

The Poetics of Failure Balzac’s Utopian War The realist novel’s engagement with the Napoleonic Wars begins with an utter failure. When Balzac in the late 1820s and early 1830s sketched out a plan for his next novel, he had hardly an inkling of the difficulties it held in store for him. The project was clear enough. In his notebook one reads the following entry: “To write a novel entitled La Bataille [The Battle], where you hear the cannon roaring on the first page and the cry of victory on the last one.”3 At first he appears to have chosen the Battle of Marengo, naming his future project La Bataille 1800,4 but then he set his mind on the Battle of Wagram. This novel was meant to be the second volume of a triptych devoted to the Napoleonic Wars. The first volume should depict Napoleon in the years leading up to the battle, and the final volume would take his ultimate downfall as its subject. La Bataille, however, was to be devoted entirely to a single battle. Later in the notebook La Bataille frequently crops up among his other projects related to the Napoleonic Wars,5 and his correspondence in the summer and fall of 1832 contains a repeated series of enthusiastic, exaggerated claims with regard to his progress on the novel, followed by exasperated confessions of suffering from writer’s block.6 The publication date is repeatedly deferred, and in October he writes to Zulma Carraud, “You win! I haven’t written a line of la Bataille. But I have put so much into it!”7 It is clear that the novel is of vital importance, and Balzac continues his efforts, the deadline now pushed into 1833.8 He even plans a visit to various

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battlefields to inspect the terrain in person. But in spite of his great efforts, Balzac cannot write the novel. He vacillates between the battlefields of Wagram, Gross-Aspern/Essling, and Dresden as his subject matter, and eventually he writes to Madame Hanska, “I have dived into the work like Empedocles into his volcano to remain there. La Bataille will appear after Le Médecin de campagne [ . . . ] and it should make you tremble when I tell you that La Bataille is an impossible book. [ . . . ] For three months now I have stood face to face with this work, this ode in two volumes, and from all sides people yell that it is impossible.”9 The impossibility has to do with scale. No longer limited to city interiors but to the depiction of an entire country, no longer focusing on a single individual but on an entire army, Balzac’s subject “is no longer an apartment, but a battlefield.” It is “the shock of France and of Europe.”10 The problem Balzac faces is that of the representability of mass phenomena. Not only has the confined space of a Parisian apartment been exchanged for the open expanses of the battlefield, his protagonists are no longer concrete individuals but the abstract masses of entire armies. Acting in a boundless space, these masses vastly increase the number of dramatic incidents. As Balzac writes via his delegate Félix Davin in the introduction to Études de moeurs au XIXe siècle (Studies of Manners in the 19th Century), “La Bataille, which has already been announced several times and whose publication has been delayed by scruples full of modesty, this book known only to a few friends, forms one of the largest tableaus in this series bursting with so many heroic figures, with so many dramatic incidents sanctioned by history that the novelist could never have invented anything as beautiful.”11 The book’s promise, however, led to its ultimate abandonment. While the discourse about the difficulties of writing the novel bloomed, the writing of the novel itself stalled before it began, and the grand tableau of a multiplicity of dramatic events was left unfinished. Of the planned two-volume novel, Balzac scribbled only a minuscule fragment on the verso of the manuscript for Le Médecin de campagne. It reads: LA BATAILLE FIRST CHAPTER: Gross-Aspern 16 May 1809, toward noon12

As any reader of Balzac will know, this grand failure did not entail the exclusion of military subjects from his oeuvre. Scattered across the Comédie humaine one finds a number of military episodes on a much smaller scale, and

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in this sense the abandonment of La Bataille may, as one commentator claims, be regarded as a “fertile failure.”13 These later episodes, however, turn war into an image. As Patrick Berthier points out, they display Balzac’s fascination with the splendor of the military spectacle.14 War as an object of inquiry in and of itself is given up. Why? Tetsuo Takayama, investigating the underlying reasons for Balzac’s abandonment of numerous literary works, is certainly correct to point to the exaggerated scope of many of the projects.15 But the failure of La Bataille is more than the result of an indomitable imagination; it marks an important point in the intellectual history of warfare. Events of the past, the Napoleonic Wars had ceased to be a matter of physical hardship, national struggles, and military strategy. They were now first and foremost a matter of representation. Not to commanders but to writers was given the task of managing warfare. Balzac felt this responsibility strongly. In Modeste Mignon the poet Canalis exclaims, “Your fifteen years of fighting are now nothing but ideas, and this is what will save the Empire: the poets will make it into a poem! A country that knows how to win such battles should know how to sing them!”16 As the case of Balzac shows, the intellectual afterlife of the wars is dominated by the question of such literary savoir-faire. War becomes a question of poetics and, specifically, of the poetics of the emerging realist novel. The failure of La Bataille is indeed fruitful, but not simply because it led to numerous minor military scenes. Rather the topic of war throws sand into the otherwise well-oiled machinery of Balzac’s literary production and triggers a self-reflection on the conditions of literary representation. To sharpen the problematic that Balzac faces, it is instructive to first consider György Lukács’s theory of the novel. For Lukács the realist novel comprises two main elements. On the one hand, it strives to represent what he, with a phrase borrowed from Hegel, calls the “totality of objects.”17 This is a comprehensive picture of the world that includes all objects and events that belong to a particular theme. On the other hand, however, the totality can be depicted only through a selection of “typical” objects, characters, and events. The openly Marxist aesthetics that informs Lukács’s theory demands that the specific individual destinies express the underlying movement of history. In other words, the personal fictional story must be typical of the larger developments of history.18 For Lukács the typicality of the dramatic intrigue is therefore the defining characteristic of realist novels and, given the normative impulse of his theory, the yardstick against which they should be measured.

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The limitations of such a conception of literature aside, it captures well Balzac’s representational dilemma in writing La Bataille. His comments on the foundering project reveal a disjuncture between totality and type, that is, between his desire to depict warfare comprehensively and his inability to bring it into a typical form. This disjuncture is a matter of clashing perspectives. The notebook and the letters sketch out his ambition of creating “one of the largest paintings” of a battle scene, but a painting made from a bird’s-eye perspective. The battle will be depicted “as if [the reader] observed it from a mountaintop, with all its accessories, uniforms, wounded soldiers, details.”19 The elevated perspective is further indicated by the addendum to the title that Balzac announces early in 1833: LA BATAILLE, vue de L’Empire (1809).20 Balzac’s notes sketch out the dream of a literary cartography that from above captures the complete picture with every event, every detail visible. He insists on the pretension to comprehensiveness: “In the book, I try to initiate you into all the horrors, all the beauties of a battlefield, my battle is Essling; Essling and all its consequences.”21 In other words, while striving toward a cartographic point of view he refuses to perform the necessary selection: everything must be represented. Balzac’s imagined novel is a literary analogue to the 1:1 map that Borges will later invent in his story “On Exactitude in Science.” Here zealous cartographers construct a map that is coextensive with what it represents. Their map of the empire they inhabit literally covers the entire empire, allowing them to avoid the process of selection, organization, scaling, and miniaturizing.22 Striving toward a complete mimesis, the novel La Bataille is to be coextensive with the battle it represents. In his attempt to depict in its entirety Berenhorst’s empire of chance, Balzac seeks to bypass the selection of “the most important objects” and the “most typical events” that for Lukács is essential for the novel’s ability to represent as well as for its representativeness.23 In the battle scenes of the chivalric epic poem of the Renaissance—a genre that is barely conceivable without the depiction of war—the heroes formed the dense points that embodied the sprawling masses and focused them in a clear-cut figure. When Godfrey in Torquato Tasso’s The Liberation of Jerusalem enters the fray and takes his stand “near the centre of the conflict,” the centrality of the character and of his position on the field is emblematic of the way the epic solved the problem, namely through metonymy.24 But when Balzac exchanges Marengo with Wagram with Essling with Dresden, his elusive protagonist remains the same: war. War not as the heroic exploits of a few courageous individuals but as the matrix of a

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potentially infinite number of plots. With La Bataille Balzac becomes the first among the major novelists of the nineteenth century to take as his protagonist the Napoleonic Wars themselves. But speaking in Lukács’s terms, the “type” thereby disappears, or rather it merges with the totality. The historical transformation of the nature of war comes to the fore as a subject in its own right, but without a singular point that focuses the totality of objects and events, Balzac lacks a formal mold to give it shape. Lukács at one point claims that Balzac more clearly than anyone else saw “the infinite net of chance” that forms the engine of historical development.25 When Balzac seeks to describe it directly in its most extreme form, however, he imagines a literary absolute beyond the representational limits of his medium.

Literature as Simulation A certain vision of representation emerges out of the ruins of Balzac’s abandoned project. On the one hand, his metacommentaries delineate a kind of literary cartography, the utopian project of a complete overview of the field of representation. Such a representation is literally utopian in that it has no definite place of origin and no perspective. Omniscient in intent, and not just in principle but also in its manifestation, La Bataille is a book that can be authored only by a divine power. On the other hand, the commentaries often suggest that Balzac was simultaneously entertaining a competing understanding of literary representation. In spite of his vision of a total literary cartography, he does not wish to abandon the situated perspective of concrete, singular individuals. The readers are to experience the battle as if they were themselves taking part in it: Sitting in his armchair, a coolheaded man should see the countryside, the accidents of the terrain, the masses of men, the strategic events, the Danube, the rivers, he should admire the details of the ensemble of this struggle, hear the artillery, interest himself in the chess moves, see everything, and in every single articulation of this enormous body he should feel Napoleon, whom I will not show or whom I will make appear in the evening as he crosses the Danube in a barque.—Not a glimpse of a woman, only cannons, horses, two armies, uniforms; on the first page the cannon roars, on the last one it falls silent, you will read through the smoke, and when you close the book, you will have seen everything intuitively and remember the battle as if you had participated in it.26

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Turning the pages, the readers not only see the battlefield at a distance from the mountaintop, but Balzac intends to carry their armchairs down through the smoke onto the battlefield. The movement toward a utopian position outside the representation is here reversed: the readers are to be plunged into it, to be immersed in the representation. As Clausewitz before him, Balzac imagines a literary simulation of war, an “as if ” structure that generates a virtual experience of war in the readers. To achieve this effect La Bataille must, from the first page to the last, activate the senses—not just vision, but hearing, touch, smell. The literary description of a battle must, as Balzac writes elsewhere, shake up the entrails. Again what we are to experience is not a specific brave action but the state of war as such. This is why Balzac excludes Napoleon from the representation and describes individuals as generic figures identified only by their accouterments: uniforms, horses, cannons. In theory the readers are to be immersed in “le grand tohu-bohu”—the chaotic full-scale confrontation of masses.27 Balzac thus develops an alternative understanding of novelistic representation, what we might call literature as simulation. This form relies on a situated perspective, a perspective that can be aligned with that of the reader. The imaginary recruit, whom Clausewitz followed onto the battlefield, functions as an anchor point for the simulation, an avatar who serves as an extension of the readers’ sensorium. In similar fashion Balzac plans a “topical” perspective, one that is located on the battlefield itself such that the alignment of perspectives inside and outside of the work can take place. In this way the invisible fourth wall of the representation can be broken down and the readers can, in a virtual fashion, enter the fray. Such a literary strategy entails an epistemic shift from disembodied knowledge to sensation, for as a simulation, the realist novel strives neither toward omniscience nor toward some kind of objective depiction of the world predicated on a correspondence theory of representation. Rather the mea sure of its realism is the degree to which the body is activated, the degree to which the sensorium of the cold readers sitting passively in their armchairs is affected. In other words, there is no realism in the text. The text serves as a medium, a catalyst for the actual effects it has on the senses of the readers. In this view realism is an effect that occurs outside of the text. And it consists in realizing, in making real, the potential affects that the readers would have had if they had been actual participants in the represented phenomenon.

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Adieu: Dynamics and Affective Power This alternative conception of realistic writing is the main subject of a text Balzac penned shortly before his attempt at La Bataille. Published in 1830, the novella Adieu was, like his abandoned war novel, intended to form a part of the Scènes de la vie militaire (Scenes from Military Life). Ostensibly concerned with the healing of trauma with the aid of a simulation, it may at a deeper level be read as a play within the play, so to speak—a metacommentary on literature itself. In a random encounter Philippe de Sucy, a veteran of the Russian Campaign, sees his beloved, Stéphanie de Vandières, from whom he was separated during the crossing of the Beresina in 1812. But the horrifying experience of the slaughtering of the paltry remains of the Grande Armée on their retreat from Moscow has left her in a state of madness, and she does not recognize him. An animal in human form, she has lost all memory and all capacity for rational thought, and her only linguistic utterance is “adieu”—the last word spoken when she and Philippe were separated. In a flashback Balzac describes the events at Beresina and then returns to the present, 1819–1820, to depict Philippe’s attempt to restore her sanity. Two methods are brought into play. At first he gradually gains her confidence and then proceeds to reason with her, but to no avail: in spite of his patient explanations, she recognizes neither him nor her own proper name. This failure, however, leads him to conceive of a more radical method. Returning to his estate, he uses all resources at his disposal to build a topographically accurate model of the site of the Beresina crossing. His park is a fitting choice because it contains a swamp that closely resembles the right embankment of the Beresina River, and a small village, Satout, is perched upon a hill overlooking the plain, as was the village Studzianka in 1812. But the superficial similarity offered by nature is insufficient for Philippe’s purpose. He begins a major transformation of the park in order to turn it into a replica of the site of the crossing: workers dig a canal to represent the Beresina; he copies the bank where seven years before General Éblé had built his bridges; the trestlework of the bridge is set on fire so it appears black, as it had been earlier; he orders debris to be strewn by the river to be used for a raft like the one that had brought Stéphanie across the river: “He ravaged his park in order to complete the illusion on which he based his last hope.”28 The model he builds is composed of a series of resemblances, where each element in the model stands in a mimetic relation to its original counterpart.

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His park is thus the sum of these relationships: a topographical replica of the river Beresina and environs, a “fake Russia” that contains such a “dreadful truth” that several veterans recognize the scene of their former misery.29 And yet Philippe goes further. Spatial similarity is not sufficient for the treatment, so he proceeds to animate the model in order to obtain a functional mimesis. For this purpose he procures a carriage like the one that had brought Stéphanie from Moscow to Studzianka, has her drugged with opium before she is placed inside it, and drives it through the park: “And as the colonel had calculated, Stéphanie drove across the fictive plain of the Beresina at nine o’clock in the morning.”30 At his signal a thousand peasants, dressed up in ragged uniforms, erupt in a terrible scream that wakes Stéphanie. The topographical replica and the functional mimesis thus work together to create a four-dimensional simulation of the past. The centerpiece of the simulation is Stéphanie. As she wakes up inside it, steps into the snow, witnesses the masses of roaring soldiers, the debris, and the burned bridge, the distinction between past and present, reality and simulation collapses. The model performs an inversion of the functional mode of conventional war simulations. Whether on maps, in war games, or in texts, the illusion works by way of Coleridge’s famed “willing suspension of disbelief ” that relies on a clear demarcation of the artifice and its outside.31 At the basis of the ability to suspend one’s disbelief in a fiction lies an unarticulated and unquestioned belief in reality. In Balzac’s story, however, Stéphanie is in a state of disbelief in reality, and she now abandons it altogether for a belief in the artifice. When she hears the screams, feels the snow, and sees Philippe armed and in uniform, she regains her reason and recognizes him. After a living death of seven years, Stéphanie is restored to life by the simulation’s electrifying impact on her senses. She is literally galvanized: “The human will came with its electrical torrents and invigorated the body from which she had so long been absent.”32 The color returns to her pallid face and her body convulses. The efficacy of the simulation thus depends on the degree to which it activates her sensorium: here vision, touch, and hearing. The initial success of Philippe’s treatment is a result of her total immersion in the simulation. Stéphanie is her own avatar and thus directly subject to all the sensory input it generates. Yet she never leaves the simulated world. Totally immersed, she remains trapped within the representation and does not regain the ability to distinguish between the two orders of reality. She not only lives the simulation; she also dies inside the simulated world. Uttering a final “Adieu,” she “cadaverizes.”33 The inversion of conventional simulations thus remains intact. In the end the

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simulated world provides her with her only brief glimpse of reality before she passes away. One of Balzac’s early texts, Adieu evokes a number of Romantic topoi, including madness, fairy tales, a suicide. Yet the novella’s Romantic élan is repeatedly undercut by a more prosaic view of things.34 The trauma is induced by a historical event that transforms the protagonist into a monkey-like beast.35 Further, with the exception of Philippe, the destruction of the Grande Armée generates no heroic efforts of resistance among the French, only a brutish fight for survival. Written in a period of transition, Adieu distances itself from Balzac’s own literary past and points forward to that monument of realism: the Comédie humaine. In this context the novella appears to serve a more theoretical purpose. At a deeper level it may be read as an examination of simulations as a model for narrative representation. More than a representation within a representation, Philippe’s model can be seen as a representation of representation. From this point of view another series of resemblances obtain, not between 1812 and 1820 but between the fake Russia of 1820 and the fiction of reading. Driving into the simulated world, Stéphanie figures the reader’s entry into the fictional world of the text. Stéphanie-as-reader is here exposed to all the creative designs of the author of the simulation, Philippe, whose purpose is to generate affects. The strategy of realistic illusion—the copying, the resemblances, the make-believe—is the fictive means to stimulate real affects. Parisian society is quick to pass judgment on Philippe’s efforts, for in itself the symbolic copy of a segment of reality is pure “madness,”36 but as a catalyst that generates or realizes emotions, the illusion has real effects. More than anything, Adieu displays the power of such simulations. Indeed Balzac pushes it to such an extreme that it is given a greater force than reality. Not only can the simulation bring Stéphanie to life; it also has the power to kill her. Survivor of the slaughter at Beresina, she dies inside a fictional world. Her inversion of the oppositions of belief and disbelief, artifice and reality thus receives an ultimate justification: the carefully constructed simulation is more powerful than the original from which it is derived. It is reality on steroids. With this novella Balzac pushes the concept of simulations beyond its conventional limits to the point where it absorbs the real and intensifies its transformative power. As a model for texts, however, such simulations would remain at the level of theory. Building parks is one thing, building literary texts quite another. Not a question of lumber but of poetics, the construction of a literary simulation of a full-fledged Napoleonic battle was, for Balzac, of a

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different degree of difficulty. Here the text was to take the role of the model. The matrix of war needed to be transformed into a textual matrix designed by poetics to immerse readers in it. The narrative itself should carry the readers’ armchairs onto the battlefield and activate their sensorium in order to generate in them a virtual experience of war. As his metacommentaries show, Balzac’s encounter with the Napoleonic Wars resulted in two theories of poetics, one that approximates the aperspectival cartographic overview and another that adopts a situated perspective in order to generate a simulated experience. The failure of La Bataille makes evident Balzac’s inability to reconcile these two opposed forms of representation. There is a sense in which the protracted struggle with the novel recapitulates the disagreement in military theory between Jomini and Clausewitz. Like the latter, Balzac strives to develop an apt representation of the state of war understood as a vast complex matrix of contingent events and chooses to place the reader in medias res; like the former, however, Balzac proposes a cartographic organization of space. As part of his preparation, in 1832 he procures a number of books and atlases, among them General Alexandre-Frédéric Drieu’s Le Guide du Pontonnier (Guide for the Pontoneer), which includes a topographical map of the Lobau, the site of both the Battle of Aspern-Essling and the Battle of Wagram in 1809. Poring over the maps and, like a topographical engineer, visiting the battlefields to inspect the terrain, Balzac attempts to sketch out his own narrative map of the battle. The conflict internal to his ruminations thus recapitulates the more general conflict between two approaches to the representation and management of war. More than a failure, La Bataille is the site where the strengths and weaknesses of two literary strategies are weighed against each other.

Mapping Poetics: Force Fields and Literary Management Balzac was not the first to develop a cartographically inflected poetics on the basis of the Napoleonic Wars. Kleist had proposed a related if somewhat curious approach to the organization of the literary text. According to the travel account of a certain Christian Gottlieb Hölder, he encountered Kleist at an inn in Switzerland in 1801, and during their conversation on drama Kleist seized a knife and carved a figure into the table (Figure 6.1).37 Kleist’s sketch depicts the space of drama. It is complex because it superimposes a cartographic measurement of space on a suspense curve. The hero attempts to move from point a to point b and this delineates an extensive space,

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c: death of the hero

b–c: the intensive field destiny: ‘anti-grav’ a: the starting point

a–b: the extensive field

b: the goal

figure 6.1 Kleist’s sketch of the space of drama. From Christian Gottlieb Hölder, Meine Reise über den Gotthard nach den Borromäischen Inseln und Mailand; und von da zurück über das Val Formozza, die Grimsel und das Oberland im Sommer 1801 (Stuttgart, 1804), 174. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.

but it is supplemented by the strategic frame of opposing forces: the force of the hero and the force of destiny. The opposition between these two forces gives rise to a field of intensity. The space of the sketch is thus defined both as an extensive spatial field and as an intensive force field, the one superimposed upon the other. Here the viewer must switch between a cartographic point of view of the extensive field and a view in profile of the intensive field. Working together they generate the parabolic function of the hero’s movement as he is pushed further and further away from his goal toward his ultimate destruction, which coincides with the point of maximum intensity. The purpose of the sketch is to serve as a tool for the author for the optimal dosing of intensity. According to Hölder, Kleist claimed “that you could determine the relation between the different parts of the drama mathematically and that this theorem could be proven just as well as any theorem out of Euclid.”38 When challenged he became a bit less categorical: “At least his triangle illustrates and simplifies the rules of drama tremendously.”39 If, for example, after the first act, the intensity curve is already at point x, then one must extend the line bc to point z so that there will not be a drop-off in intensity in the second and third act. Manipulating the sketch becomes a way of managing the intensive field in relation to the overall dramatic structure.

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As Napoleon’s triangulations served as a practical aid to the commander for the strategic management of the terrain, so Kleist’s triangulation of drama is meant to serve as a practical aid to the author for the management of literary space. Yet this literary strategy was to suffer the same fate as Balzac’s attempt to manage war some thirty years later. Kleist abandoned Robert Guiskard, the play he was working on at the time of the sketch, and in 1806 he also abandoned this cartographically inflected poetics of management. Upon hearing that Rühle von Lilienstern was thinking about writing fiction, Kleist offered a piece of advice: “Follow your feeling. Simply trust your luck and give us what seems beautiful to you. It is a gamble, like a throw of the dice; but that is all there is.”40 Literary strategies are subject to the same probabilistic conditions as military strategies. In both domains, therefore, one must learn not to be a “commissarius of security,” as Rühle puts it.41 Not only the inexperienced commander but also the inexperienced author must learn to cope with contingency, not through literary maps and cautious planning but through immersion. As these examples show, modern war had become an intractable phenomenon that required new representational models. The cartographic apparatus that emerged around 1800 had installed maps as a tool of management that not just commanders but also authors sought to apply to the state of war. While they are ultimately rejected by both Kleist and Balzac, they came to shape the poetics of war, for it is against the foil of maps and their absolute perspective that first Kleist and later the realist novel delineate the features of a literary model of representation. Perhaps as a result of his struggle with La Bataille, Balzac had become keenly aware of the correspondences between the art of war and the art of writing. For a particularly difficult task, when a deadline is impending, Balzac in his Traité des excitants modernes (Treatise on Modern Stimulants) advises that one should imbibe a cup of coffee on an empty stomach. The excitation of the body then propagates to the brain, where a heated battle commences: “At that point everything boils: the ideas move around like the battalions of the Grande Armée on the battlefield, and the battle begins. Memories forge ahead on the attack; the light cavalry of comparisons develop into a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with its trains and cartridges; the flashes of inspiration come shooting; the characters develop, the paper is covered with ink, for the vigil begins and ends with torrents of black water like the battle with its black

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powder.”42 The metaphorical battles that would take place in Balzac’s study indicate the degree to which warfare had penetrated the heart and stomach of literary production. As Ian Baucom has argued, war became one of the “moving centers” of realism in the nineteenth century, a driving force or overarching thematic that organizes the world of the novel.43 The appearance of this overwhelming force in the novel, however, created problems of representation. A viable poetics of war became a desideratum of the emerging realist novel, a central problematic that Balzac did not solve but articulated and bequeathed to the generations after him.

Stendhal and the Roadmap into the Novel The first edition of the Revue parisienne, a short-lived journalistic enterprise that Balzac directed in 1840, contains an article on the principles of modern art. Balzac uses Eugène Sue’s recently published novel Jean Cavalier as a negative example in order to develop a poetics of the historical novel. Pointing out all the errors committed by his competitor, he lays down “the laws of Poetics” for contemporary literature.44 These laws are explicitly developed as a way of managing the representation of war. The choice of the military exploits of Jean Cavalier, the famed commander of the Camisards during the Wars of Cévenne in the early eighteenth century, puts a high demand on the skills of the author, skills that Sue, according to Balzac, was lacking in every respect. The four-volume work covers two entire campaigns in which the reader must imagine the terrain from the Cévenne in the Massif Central all the way to Montpellier—a distance of some seventy kilometers. But, claims Balzac, “it is impossible for literary art to paint the military facts beyond a certain range.”45 Instead of an entire campaign, the novelist must choose some “circumscribed terrain” and represent the battle by way of an échantillon (an example) or, as Lukács would put it, a “type.”46 One might see in Balzac’s censure an oblique self-critique, for the representation of war in Jean Cavalier approximates the one theory of poetics that Balzac had himself adumbrated in his work on La Bataille. Not just a single battle but the events and topography of two entire campaigns, Sue’s subject matter exceeds the representational limits of the novel. In Jean Cavalier Balzac sees materialized his own imagined project of an absolute depiction of war, and he now revises his theory of poetics accordingly, for the rules of art make such an approach impossible.

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Instead he endorses an alternate poetics, of simulations, for Balzac proceeds to another instantiation of his former theory, the battle scene in Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma), which had appeared a few months earlier. Few reviews have attained the fame of the eulogy Balzac published in September 1840 in the same journal, yet his earlier brief comments are more revealing from the point of view of poetics: Nevertheless, without concealing the vastness of the enterprise and its difficulties, I think that it should be possible to depict the movement of camps, the enormous confusion of a battle by placing the general’s spyglass in front of the reader’s eye; but it will be necessary to use a large typographical space and to exercise the rarest of literary talents. In a recent masterpiece, M. Beyle has felt the impossibilities that I signal by making a magnificent military sketch [croquis militaire]. He has not endeavored to paint the full picture of the battle at Waterloo, he has followed the rearguard of the army, he has presented two or three episodes of the defeat; but his brush has been so powerful that the mind sees beyond it: the eye takes in all of the battlefield and the entire enormous disaster. This episode reveals that the author is aware of the literary peril. I hasten to tell you that I regard the author of La Chartreuse de Parme as one of the most profound minds and best writers of our time. His role will be greater than has been supposed.47

Following a method diametrically opposed to that of Eugène Sue, Stendhal abandons all pretensions to totality and instead offers only a “sketch.” Telescoping the reader into the midst of the battle, the text offers a few close-ups of war of such power that the entire battle can be imaginatively extrapolated from these situated representations. If Jean Cavalier can be seen as the manifestation of Balzac’s poetics of a literary cartography, Stendhal’s battle scene might be regarded as the manifestation of his poetics of simulation. Balzac himself appears to be of this opinion. A year earlier he had read an excerpt of the novel in Le Constitutionnel and had written directly to Stendhal that he had been “seized by a fit of jealousy because of this superb and true description of battle that I had dreamed of for the Scènes de la vie militaire, the most difficult part of my work, and this piece has delighted me, grieved me, enthralled me, and driven me to despair.”48 Regardless of Balzac’s evaluation of Stendhal’s achievement, one might ask in just what sense the battle scene in Charterhouse can be regarded as a simulation. What does it mean for the readers

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to be in the midst of battle? By which technical means does the text take on the properties of a telescope?

Itineraries, Avatars, Implication The scene that Stendhal develops in the battle scene at Waterloo is fragmented, fractured, dislocated. It is a heterogeneous space that does not form a coherent whole but only a series of discrete and dizzying topographies. This has already been amply described, and I will therefore not rehearse the discussion.49 For my purposes, however, it is worth noting that the space of the Battle of Waterloo is developed against the background of a different spatial model presented earlier in the novel. When Fabrice receives the news of Napoleon’s return from Elba, Stendhal with ill-concealed symbolism links this event to the arrival of an eagle, “Napoleon’s bird,” which flies toward Switzerland and Paris. At this very moment Fabrice decides to join the French ranks and embarks upon the journey to the French capital. It is an idea that comes “from above” like a “divine breath.” Immediately following his decision, an image appears before his eyes: “I saw this large image of Italy rise up from the mud in which the Germans had kept it immersed.”50 In this earlier model the approaching war is figured from a bird’s-eye view, if not a divine perspective, and it conjures images the size of countries. It is this totalizing, comprehensive spatial model that serves as a foil for and is undone by Stendhal’s construction of the battlefield. But more than mere fragmentation, the scene at Waterloo creates the conditions for the readers’ gradual immersion into the representation. This appears more clearly when considered through the lens of recent developments in narrative theory. Transposing concepts such as virtual reality, immersion, and interactivity from the domain of technology to that of literature, Marie-Laure Ryan in her book Narrative as Virtual Reality sketches out the poetics of a phenomenology of reading. How are those texts constructed that make the readers’ projection into the fiction possible and that create the illusion that the readers participate in the fictional events? Even if no one can force readers to immerse themselves in fictional worlds, as Richard J. Gerrig notes, such immersion is not simply the function of a random disposition but a problem of design.51 While the reading experience always relies on the reader’s co-construction of the text and thus contains a strong subjective element, as Roman Ingarden and Wolfgang Iser have pointed out,52 a number of pa rameters and techniques can

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nevertheless be identified that facilitate projection and generate the sense of presence, the sense that we live the fiction. In Ryan’s enumeration of these techniques, they are opposed to other narrative devices that have the effect rather of excluding readers from the fictional world, of blocking them out. These include scene versus summary, internal focalization versus external focalization, dialogue versus reporting, prospective first-person narration versus retrospective authorial narration, mimesis (showing) versus diegesis (telling), and, further, the transposition of the deictics of narration from the here and now of the narrator to the here and now of the character.53 More generally one might say that immersion depends on the ability of the text to hide the act of representing inside its product, to make the representational layer vanish. For Ryan, however, a final element is necessary to transform the text into a full-fledged simulation: dynamism. As I mentioned in chapter 4, computer simulations are concerned with the representation of processes, of operations and functions rather than static objects. In literary texts this is the task performed by the narrative.54 It is the narrative that injects time, transformation, and movement into the world of the fictional elements and that generates the experience of an active, dynamic environment.55 With this in mind, let us enter the Battle of Waterloo. Arrested as a spy, Fabrice spends thirty-three days in prison before he succeeds in bribing the guards and escapes. He dons the uniform of a dead soldier, Boulot, and sets out in search of war. With him he brings Boulot’s so-called feuille de route. This military document can be variously translated as roadmap, itinerary map, travel permit, marching orders, or movement orders. It serves as an authorization of the soldier’s travel as well as a guide that indicates the location of his regiment and describes the route he must take to join it. An example of such a feuille de route is shown in Figure 6.2.56 This document from December 1815, some six months after the Battle of Waterloo, authorizes a certain Couture, age twenty-two, to travel from Narbonne to Amiens by way of a number of lodgings indicated on the second page. While the feuille de route may have been accompanied by maps, it does not have any topographic or indeed cartographic dimension itself. Rather it authorizes a situated, serial movement through space. The form contains columns for both the expected and the effective date of the soldier’s arrival, and each stage in this travel through space is marked temporally. In its function as an itinerary, the feuille de route projects a sequential spatial order grounded in the situated perspective of a traveler.

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The feuille de route may serve as a model for the construction of space in Charterhouse. The makeup of the battlefield develops gradually, in increments, as Fabrice moves around on it. Studying carefully the itinerary he has poached from Boulot, he marches along the roads of Belgium until he comes within earshot of the cannons at Waterloo. Once he has arrived in the vicinity of the battle, a living guide takes on the role of the symbolic medium. Not knowing where the Sixth Regiment is to be found, he finds a cantinière to lead him. From here on, the battle scene unfolds from the perspective of the personalized experience of the protagonist as he moves through space. As Fabrice slowly advances through the mud, his sensorium becomes the anchor point of the represented world. For example, the deictics of orientation are transposed to the level of the character: “to the left,” “to the right”;57 space is described in real time, and distance is mea sured temporally: “At this moment the road disappeared into thicket of trees [my emphasis],” the sixth regiment is located “down there, five minutes from here”;58 when Fabrice gets farther into the fray, the cannons are in surround sound: he hears “a terrible racket, the cannons and the muskets thundered from all sides, to the right, to the left, behind.”59 The narrative topography of the scene at Waterloo recalls Michel de Certeau’s distinction between lieu and espace, or place and space. As an instantaneous configuration of positions, place implies stability and designates a geographical or geometrical space. Space, however, is anthropological and includes “vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. [It] is composed of intersections of mobile elements . . . [and] occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities.”60 Instead of an implied or explicitly described container or frame that is merely waiting to be filled with events, the space of war in Charterhouse takes place, it happens. Tying the perspective to a situated participant, Stendhal effects a collusion of three distinct planes: writing, experiencing, and reading. As a writing-of-space, a topo-graphein, the text writes a space that emerges as the effect of a movement that is at once that of Stendhal’s narrative, Fabrice’s advancement across the terrain, and the saccadic motion of the readers’ eyes. Without a map or a vantage point from which to get a comprehensive view, the obstacles of the terrain appear out of nothing only when the narrative, Fabrice, and the reader move toward them. In de Certeau’s terminology, Waterloo is a space without place.

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figure 6.2 Couture’s road map of December 1815. Feuille de route de sous-officier et soldat. Courtesy of Frédéric Duprez.

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As Clausewitz walked his reader onto the battlefield by way of an imaginary recruit and Balzac drove the reader into the simulation of the Beresina episode in Stéphanie’s carriage, Stendhal in this way gives the readers a feuille de route that inch by inch brings them into the heat of battle. Minimizing the difference between narrative form and the experiential world of Fabrice, Stendhal aligns the perspective of the representation with that of the readers, such that they can project themselves into the figure of Fabrice. When the cantinière urges Fabrice to approach the corpse that startles him, she directs the reader as much as she directs Fabrice: “Approach, the cantinière said to him; get off your horse.”61 Stendhal’s decision to let Fabrice get down on the ground and shake hands with the corpse might be seen as an attempt to activate even the sense of touch. Fabrice has become the readers’ avatar, an extension of their sensorium. Mental projection and the impact it has on the reader or viewer are prefigured by a scene earlier in the novel. To learn Latin, Fabrice is aided by a series of engravings, published in 1650 by the hero’s eponymous ancestor. They depict the military exploits of the Valserra family, and they all represent Fabrice del Dongo commanding the field, not unlike Rinaldo or Orlando Furioso, the heroes of his preferred epics. Fascinated by the engravings and given their identical names, Fabrice can easily project himself into the role of the general taking charge of the space around him.62 In this scene Fabrice not only learns his Latin; he also provides a model for the ultimate purpose of Stendhal’s poetics of war. While the Battle of Waterloo serves to debunk all the romantic illusions of glory and epic chivalry that Fabrice entertains, it has the similar goal of creating an avatar, of collapsing the distance between the medium and the reader, such that projections and immersion can occur. Now this border is just external to the novel and not an internal one. It is hardly coincidental that Fabrice is wearing the uniform of Boulot when he enters the fray. Playing the role of another, Fabrice projects himself into the battle and moves around as the avatar of a dead man. The telescopic effect noted by Balzac is thus the result of a number of aesthetic devices that closely approximate those enumerated by Ryan. The mimetic mode, the deictics, the focalized, prospective narration, the situated movement through an unfolding space—all combine to construct a three-dimensional animated simulation that activates the sense of sight, the sense of touch, the sense of hearing, and perhaps also secondary senses such

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as balance and proprioception.63 Speaking about the beginning of his own military years in 1800–1814, during which he was attached to the Grande Armée in various functions, Stendhal writes, “It was my destiny to conquer everything with the sword. What ocean of violent sensations I have had in my life and particularly during this period.”64 To transmit these sensations to his readers, Stendhal makes simulation a matter of implication. The readers are to be implicated in the scene, affected by it, folded into it. While an actual interaction with the representation is beyond the purview of nineteenth-century realist fiction, the purpose is nevertheless to force upon the reader an imaginative and sensorial involvement. Harry Levin once called war the test case for realist fiction because it has so frequently been obscured by vain ideas of heroism and encumbered by the conventional forms of epic and romance.65 Yet Stendhal’s textual strategies transformed war into one of the most powerful literary simulations in realist fiction. The bombardment of the sensory apparatus and the constant movement and transformation of the fictional elements make the textual world impose itself upon the reader with an unseen intensity and force. Indeed one might regard the Battle of Waterloo as a watershed at several levels. Historically, of course, it marks the end of an epoch, of the reign of Napoleon and the promises attendant on him;66 personally it forms the site where Fabrice loses all the illusions of war he had gleaned from reading the epic literature of Tasso and Ariosto—he literally bleeds them out;67 representationally it constitutes a rite de passage in the development of the novel itself. The exchange of the Napoleonic eagle for a dead soldier’s feuille de route marks a shift in the narrative architecture of the novel as well as in the conception of its intended effects. Abandoning the utopic cartographic perspective, Stendhal opts for a form of representation that minimizes the distance between the text and its reader and whose claim to realism lies in its effects on the body and the mind of the reader. When Balzac wrote to Stendhal full of enthusiasm and envy and suggested that he cut out the introductory chapter and simply open the novel with the battle scene, the reason may well be his sense of having been carried around in his armchair on the battlefield at Waterloo while he was reading.68

Effects without Causes For the emerging realist novel, war is a matter of design. New technical devices, however, entail a claim about the state of war. The conception of its operational logic and its epistemology is built into the textual design. From the

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point of view of a poetics of knowledge, the Battle of Waterloo as described in Charterhouse constitutes an exemplary event for an investigation of the connections between war, poetics, and epistemology. What, then, are the epistemological implications of Stendhal’s aesthetic choices? Locking perspective to the perception of a single character, Stendhal effects what Harry Levin has called the abdication of the omniscient narrator.69 This fractures the entire spatiotemporal structure of the fictional world. Not only is space segmented into a number of impressionistic fragments, but time is unhinged and becomes a matter of conjecture.70 Inside the war matrix, however, the situated perspective gives rise to a unique plot structure. Following a single narrative line as Fabrice moves around on the field, the scene nevertheless constructs a nimbus of virtual plots. Surrounding Fabrice is a seemingly infinite number of potential events that break into actuality only when they enter into the circumference of his experiential field. Suddenly, “tout à coup,” musket shots bring down two soldiers next to Fabrice, and suddenly, “tout à coup,” four soldiers appear out of the haze—soldiers that he first mistakes for the enemy.71 The famous white smoke that obscures everything is thus also a figure of the plot cloud that surrounds Fabrice’s every move. These invisible plots constitute a series of causal chains of pure effects, for it is only when they impact Fabrice that they become visible and relevant. Stendhal constructs a scene composed solely of effects. Fabrice’s one attempt at autonomous action, his one chance to link a cause to an effect, comes when he shoots a Prussian soldier. It is later revealed, however, that he missed his target and that the soldier was killed by another man. The character of Fabrice therefore serves the narrative function of a meeting point for a number of intersecting events that have nothing to do with each other, except that upon impact they send him in a new direction. One might regard Fabrice as a probe that has been submerged into the war matrix to make its operational logic visible. And this logic is one in which there is no linear relationship between causes and effects. The two have been disjointed to such an extent that causes have no effects, while effects arise seemingly without cause. At any point a new effect might appear out of nothing. The clearest example of such a logic is the impact of enemy fire. Following a group of French soldiers, Fabrice suddenly notices an almost inaudible sound next to him: “He turned his head, four men had fallen with their horses; the general himself had been knocked down, but he got up completely covered in blood. Fabrice looked at the hussars that had been thrown to the ground: three of them were still making some movements,

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the fourth yelled: Pull me out!”72 The sudden incursion of the outside has tremendous consequences not just for the victims but also for the main plot line. Although initially unharmed, Fabrice is unhorsed and left behind as the wounded French general rides off on Fabrice’s horse. The impact of the outside has a ripple effect that sets in motion another causal chain that in turn has its effect on Fabrice. No longer part of the calculable geometry that created the symmetrical architectural structures of attack and defense in siege warfare, the impact of projectiles constitutes the contingent event par excellence. The military diary of August von Larisch contains the following entry from 1809: “Barely half an hour after my arrival, just as I had lain down on the wet ground dead tired and was about to fall asleep, the whistling of a cannonball woke almost all of us, the second or third shot crushed the leg of a fine man, private Lietz, who had probably still been sleeping, and shortly after he died; as the division was getting in order, the sixth shot struck it at an angle, tore several satchels, pierced one man and sent another dead to the ground because of the air pressure or the contusion.”73 “Just as”—with this Kleistian contingency formula the cannonball strikes from an invisible surrounding space that lies outside of the experiential field of the soldiers and outside of the representation. In Charterhouse projectiles exemplify the huge field of possible events that surround the field of vision, each one a potentiality that might at any moment be realized as it breaks into actuality. The interconnection of the numerous causal chains means that a seemingly innocuous occurrence can have dire and unforeseen consequences. A few years before writing Charterhouse, Stendhal was working on the second part of a book on Napoleon entitled Mémoires sur Napoléon (Memoirs of Napoleon). Attempting to draw a portrait of Napoleon as a person but also to make the series of battles fought during the Napoleonic Empire comprehensible to nonmilitary readers, Stendhal borrows copiously from contemporary historians. Among others he copies large sections from Jomini, in particular from his Vie politique et militaire de Napoléon, racontée par lui-même (The Political and Military Life of Napoleon, Related by Himself ) that had appeared in 1827 as well as his earlier Histoire critique et militaire des guerres de la Revolution (Critical and Military History of the Wars of the Revolution). In a chapter entitled “On Military Art” Stendhal presents the basic principles of warfare. This section owes a great deal to Jomini, as is evident in an almost verbatim transcription of volume 11 of Histoire critique and also in the conception of the art of war as a game of chess.74 Yet Stendhal proceeds to

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develop a theory of the state of war that leads to an understanding of military theory fundamentally different from that of the Swiss thinker. The only rule of war is for the commander to make sure that one’s soldiers “outnumber the enemy two to one on the battlefield. That sentence says everything; that is the unique rule.”75 Any other positive claims on the art of war are merely ridiculous phrases.76 But even this most basic rule of outnumbering is subjected to time: “Often you only have two minutes to apply it.”77 More than exerting pressure, however, time transforms the initial conditions such that decisions formed in advance are made obsolete. While a commander should exert all possible foresight, there will nevertheless remain “inconveniences that appear tiny [ . . . ] that can stop everything.”78 It thus becomes a matter not of applying rules but of inventing contingency measures on the spot.79 Such measures are the response to a world that is in a fundamentally different state. For Stendhal, himself a participant in numerous Napoleonic campaigns from 1800 to 1814, including the invasion of and disastrous retreat from Russia in 1812, and thus fully cognizant of the transformations in the art of war wrought by Napoleon, war is a highly intricate system that has reached a degree of complexity in which “a single negligence, a distraction, a moment of weakness can lead to the destruction of the army.”80 The parallels to Clausewitz’s understanding of the nonlinear operational logic of war are evident. Charterhouse may be regarded as the fictional staging of such a conception of the state of war. For Stendhal the state of war is a condition in which effects are unhinged from their causes and give rise to a series of new causal chains that have entirely unforeseeable consequences. The spatiotemporal makeup of the Battle of Waterloo or, in Bakhtinian terms, the chronotope of war, is a function, a product of an underlying operative logic that governs the textual world. Fabrice’s random walk across the battlefield outlines the narrative topography of a world that emerges out of a nonlinear principle. As a consequence predictability tends toward zero. The foreseeable future contracts to one’s immediate sphere of experience, and within this experiential field the basic mode of action is reaction—an attempt to cope with a world that continuously imposes itself in random ways. In a projected revised edition of Charterhouse that never materialized, Stendhal wrote an extra scene set in Amien six weeks after the battle. Eagerly questioned by the high-society ladies, Fabrice “was careful never to say a word that might make them guess by what chain of chance events [suite de hasards] he had been carried around in the surroundings of Waterloo.”81 Causal chains that originate in the subject, as in the engravings Fabrice had admired in his

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youth, have been replaced by a series of chance events that transform the subject into a pure effect. As if to underscore this point, Stendhal repeats it at a more fundamental level in the scene in which Fabrice is impacted by the causal chain set in motion by the cannonball. The name of the general who rides off on Fabrice’s horse is Robert Count d’A***, whom Stendhal intimates is Fabrice’s father. Yet Fabrice is unaware of this, and just as he does not recognize Napoleon on the battlefield—the father and cause of the war—so he does not recognize his own presumed biological father. Bringing together the presumed father and son, Stendhal employs their copresence to flaunt the absence of the link between then, the break of lineage. On the battlefield the text marks Fabrice as the son without a father, thus inscribing into his flesh his status as a pure effect. And yet the empty place in the del Dongo genealogy is clearly occupied. Upon reaching the beginning of the military epoch in his life, Stendhal writes in his autobiography, “I am born, as Tristram Shandy says, and the reader will now leave all childishness behind.”82 But where the birth scene in Sterne exemplifies a creative and ironic contingency against the foil of an Enlightenment discourse,83 Stendhal or Fabrice, whatever name the subject is given, experiences his second birth in the midst of war, be it the actual experience at Marengo in 1800, at Wagram in 1809, at Borodino in 1812, or the virtual one at Waterloo in 1813. With Napoleon, Stendhal is given another ancestor. War is the father of all things, wrote Heraclitus. Also of Stendhal, Henri Beyle, Henry Brulard, and Fabrice del Dongo.

The Concept of War Stendhal’s vision of the state of war has consequences for the attempt to conceptualize war. Fabrice’s famous question, “Is this a real battle?,” is not resolved during the battle but remains a lingering uncertainty: “What he had seen, was that a battle? And, secondly, was this battle Waterloo?”84 The problem Fabrice faces is that of transforming individual percepts into a coherent whole at the conceptual level. In other words, war is a phenomenon that lacks an adequate concept. This recalls the Kantian problematic inherent in das Erhabene, or the sublime, where the imagination strives in vain to find an appropriate mea sure for a perception that exceeds it.85 But where the failed search of the imagination for Kant leads to a feeling of elevation and superiority as we realize that we are rational beings possessed of a supersensory faculty separate from and above the phenomenal world, Fabrice simply has no clue. The concept of reason adequate to the sensible experience never presents itself. He avidly reads the newspapers in order to find the concept that he himself is

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lacking, but in vain. It has been suggested that his failure means that the novel as such presents a conception of “war reading” that makes it impossible to determine whether he was under fire at all.86 Even if this is slightly overstated, there is something to it at the conceptual level. Even after the Battle of Waterloo has taken place it is not presented as a historical fact. In hindsight the battle is still covered by the white smoke, by the cloud of nonrepresented events that surrounded Fabrice’s field of vision.87 As a single event, the battle hovers in the realm of probability even after the fact. This was not only a fictional predicament. In the 1830s the field of historiography was haunted by a similar problem. Only a few years before Stendhal wrote Charterhouse the British officer William Siborne collected a number of eyewitness accounts from surviving soldiers of the British Army. Commissioned to build a model of the Battle of Waterloo, he searched the published accounts for accurate information but grew dissatisfied with the lack of detail.88 Accordingly he sent out a survey consisting of a series of precise questions with accompanying maps to the British soldiers who had participated in the battle. Siborne himself had been trained in surveying and mapmaking and had previously published two books on the topic, the first one based on the system of Johann Georg Lehmann.89 His purpose, as John Keegan summarizes it, of fi xing “exact locations and precise times as links in a chain of cause and effect,”90 therefore relied on the ability of the respondents to indicate their movements during the battle on the accompanying maps. While many officers attempted to do so, several had great trouble translating their lived impressions into a cartographic mold. One officer, for example, is entirely unable to mark on the plan “even the situations of those troops with which I was most immediately concerned on that occasion” and he apologizes for narrating “so imperfect a sketch.”91 Another officer questions the accuracy of the terrain indications on Siborne’s map.92 The reports articulate the discrepancy between two orders of knowledge: between their situated experience and the aperspectival comprehensive overview. As an analogue of the concept of war, Siborne’s maps and his eventual model present a mode of representation that seeks to subsume the multiplicity of events into a single organizing form, but for both fictional and real participants, the Battle of Waterloo remains a phenomenon difficult to comprehend. Even at the top of the war echelon, the Duke of Wellington expressed doubt about the attempt to establish accurately even a few of the causal chains: “It is impossible to say when each important occurrence took place, nor in what order.”93

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At the experiential level, however, no such uncertainty obtains—neither in the narrative of Fabrice nor in the reports of British soldiers. One might see in the war descriptions a series of narrative sketches that seek to impart to the readers a type of knowledge that cannot be conveyed propositionally at the conceptual level but can be transmitted only as a virtual experience. To understand Stendhal’s notion of “war reading” we need to shift our theory of reading. In Charterhouse the fact of Waterloo is transformed from a propositional fact into an experiential fact. The innovative technical structure, Stendhal’s poetics of war, enacts a shift from a conventional epistemology based on concepts to an aesthetic knowledge based on the senses and, more specifically, on the readers’ sensorium. Inside the virtual world of the textual simulation, percepts are not intended to be subsumed under concepts; they are to be seen, heard, and touched. Stendhal’s war simulation offers no unified idea of the battle, but enlisting the readers’ imagination and their willingness to project themselves into the textual world, it offers instead the embodied experience of the state of war. Did Fabrice participate in the Battle of Waterloo? Perhaps. Did he participate in the Battle of Waterloo? The only way to reach an answer is to project, immerse, and implicate oneself by reading chapter 3 of The Charterhouse of Parma.

Autobiographics: Literary Croquis and Mental Maps The situated perspective employed in the battle scene in Charterhouse does not entail a wholesale dismissal of cartography. Stendhal’s manuscripts are covered with drawings, sketches, and maps. Among the realists, Stendhal is by far the writer most preoccupied with graphics. Yet his visual construction of space employs a graphical grammar very different from conventional cartography. The most striking example of this grammar is the amalgam of visual and textual representation in his fictional autobiography La Vie de Henry Brulard (The Life of Henry Brulard). Comprising some 170 sketches of various kinds as well as explications of them, neither of the two representational modes takes precedence over the other. As Gérard Genette has stressed, both are integral to the work and indispensable for its comprehension. The sketches are a natural extension of the text.94 Closely intertwined, a small sketch is often inserted in the middle of a paragraph, while textual indications surround and are scattered across the visual, spatial configurations (Figure 6.3). The autobiography is composed of a series of distinct memory snapshots in the form of graphic transcriptions of Stendhal’s mental imagery along with an explanation

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figure 6.3 One of Stendhal’s many graphic memories that require a complementary textual explanation. From Stendhal, Vie de Henry Brulard écrite par lui-même, édition diplomatique du Manuscrit de la Bibliothèque de Grenoble, ed. Gérald Rannaud and Yvonne Rannaud (Paris: Klincksieck, 1996–1997), 1: 127.

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of the sketches. As he frequently stresses, his memory does not take the form of an extended, cohesive narrative. Instead it is like an ancient fresco in which a well-preserved section is surrounded by a void where the plaster has crumbled and left only white spots on the wall.95 As remembered images, the sketches themselves have an idiosyncratic character. While they stand sharply in his memory, they do not represent objective facts, only his sentiments.96 For example, the subsequent story of the interior of a hospice he had seen has lodged in his mind an image that has overpowered and taken the place of his original memory.97 The graphic elements of Brulard are thus the record of a subjective, recollected experience of space—an emotional cartography of things past.98 Formally the sketches vary, from maps with an aerial view following a conventional cartographic construction, to drawings with a cavalier perspective and spatial configurations of a diagrammatic character. Only a few of the sketches have a linear perspective. Most of them are flat, two-dimensional structures and tend toward the topological, marking the relative position of objects to one another, rather than the topographical. Lacking detailed indications of natural and physical features, they are, Stendhal writes, graphic memories “without physiognomy.”99 Because of this abstraction and because of their fragmented and isolated nature, Stendhal’s mental maps are by no means self-explanatory. The image “is only image.”100 It needs a context and an explanation: “Il faut narrer”—we must narrate, he writes.101 The text thereby comes to serve as a map legend that makes the visual image intelligible and meaningful. Not unlike the military sketches collected by August von Larisch, Stendhal’s Brulard is best regarded as a narrative sketch—a textual and visual croquis, imprecise and drawn from a situated perspective that renders only a fragment of space while an accompanying legend explains the key features. Just before the manuscript breaks off, as he enters Milan in 1800 with Napoleon and the French Army, Stendhal includes his own military sketch that depicts the crossing of the Great St. Bernard Pass (Figure 6.4). On the left, the H indicates Stendhal’s position at the edge of the precipice; L is the signature for the thin path running along the edge of the mountain whose degree of incline is marked by P and P’. On the right side lies the town of Bard (B) and above it a bastion with firing cannons (C). More than explaining these features, however, the legend makes it clear that the sketch contains only what Stendhal could see from his position at H. While the corpses and the wounded are outside of his field of vision, he can see the dead horses that have fallen

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figure 6.4 Stendhal’s sketch of the Great St. Bernard Pass when he crossed it as a soldier in the French Army in 1800. From Stendhal, Vie de Henry Brulard écrite par lui-même, édition diplomatique du Manuscrit de la Bibliothèque de Grenoble, ed. Gérald Rannaud and Yvonne Rannaud (Paris: Klincksieck, 1996–1997), 3: 369.

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down from the mountain (X). In accordance with Lehmann’s test of cartographic literacy, Stendhal is careful to indicate the limits to his line of sight even on his hurried sketch. Just as Henri Beyle adopts the pseudonym of Henry Brulard and thereby describes himself when speaking of an imagined other, the legend makes clear that the sketch presents a situated first-person experience of space in the guise of a situated third-person point of view. As a kind of autobiographic, the sketch depicts not just the visible but also the viewer, Stendhal, and the limits of his point of view. In this way it can be seen as an emblem of Brulard as such. Sketching with images and with text, Stendhal creates a narrative map of his life, a literary graphic that represents a series of distinct moments of lived space. These reflections have some bearing on the representational mode of Charterhouse and in particular of the Battle of Waterloo. Scholars have pointed to the close connection between the novel and the autobiography: where Brulard breaks off with the entry of the French into Milan, this scene opens Charterhouse.102 Further, as the sketches can be seen as the natural extension of the text, the novel might be regarded as a natural extension of the autobiography, as the second installment of his narrative map. Stendhal dictated the novel to his amanuensis in all haste, and while the manuscript has been lost, a map of Parma and environs, which he sketched as he began the novel, still survives among his papers (Figure 6.5). On the original sketch, Romain Colomb, Stendhal’s cousin, later scribbled a note indicating its purpose: “Beyle had drawn this sketch for the development [la marche] of his novel: La Chartreuse de Parme.”103 Organized by the cardinal directions and drawn with a reasonably consistent scale, it gives a rough but fairly accurate representation of the main cities and rivers in the area. The referential aspect, however, is of secondary importance. As Colomb writes, the function of the sketch is to help organize the imaginative world of the novel. As such it fixes the real topography for a fictional narrative and takes on a transcendental function by laying out the spatial conditions that serve at once as the strictures on the development of the text and as an aid that makes explicit the realm of possible, or at least plausible inventions. As Louis Marin has pointed out, a map is the matrix of an infinity of virtual journeys. A literary map, however, is the matrix of an infinity of virtual stories. With the exception of Fabrice’s military adventure, all of Charterhouse is invisibly present on the map and, so to speak, emerges out of this rudimentary spatial configuration. Actualizing the one narrative that became the novel, Stendhal could

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figure 6.5 Stendhal’s map of Parma and environs in Auguste Cordier’s copy. As Stendhal’s cousin Romain Colomb writes, the purpose of the sketch was to serve as a visual aid to help plan the events of The Charterhouse of Parma. From Auguste Cordier, Catalogue raisonné de pièces inédites venant de Stendhal (autographes . . . , livres et objets lui ayant appartenu, antiquités, portrait authentique, correspondance . . . de contemporains à lui adressée ou le concernant) appartenant à M. Auguste Cordier, R. 90729 Rés. Res. II, pp. 4–5: Autographes no. 28. Bibliothèques municipales de Grenoble.

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manage the development, “la marche,” of the story with the aid of his cartographic sketch. Conversely, since the sketch was not included in the printed edition of the work, it forms an invisible, virtual, graphic presence underneath the published text. In Brulard the sketches often generate the narrative explications, but the opposite also happens: in the process of writing, an image is conjured that would otherwise have remained in the dark recesses of memory.104 When reading the battle scene in Charterhouse, we sense that a similar thing appears to have happened to Stendhal. The so-called Royer copy of the novel—one of the printed copies that Stendhal owned and that he annotated for a revised second edition—contains a map sketched in pencil in the margin (Figure 6.6).105 It is inserted into the text after the episode where Fabrice loses his horse. The text proceeds to describe his oblique movement when he spots the French troops and approaches them. The sketch is not oriented by any of the cardinal directions, and the internal scale differs vastly: the distance to Brussels on the left indicates a small-scale map, whereas the right-hand side is of a very large scale. The dotted line signifies the movement of Fabrice as he crosses the ditch and swerves to the right. Here he falls to the ground from fatigue, and the word

figure 6.6 Stendhal’s map of a scene on the battlefield of Waterloo depicting Fabrice as he crosses a ditch and veers right toward a group of French soldiers. Stendhal sketched the map in pencil in the margins of the Royer copy of the novel, which he annotated for a revised second edition. From Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme, édition critique contenant les notes et additions de Stendhal, éd. Michel Crouzet (Orléans: Éditions Paradigme, 2007), 61. © Corsaire Éditions.

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pain marks the spot where a French soldier tosses him some bread and then, when Fabrice doesn’t react, walks over and stuffs it into his mouth. It is hardly an accident that the sketch is included just as Fabrice is trying to get his bearings on the battlefield: “He got up and tried to orient himself.”106 Serving less as a tool of orientation, the sketch primarily represents the process of orienting oneself in a space too vast to be comprehended. Without borders or a frame to create a sharp division between the representation and its outside,107 the sketch marks not just the experiential field of Fabrice but the fact that this experiential field forms a small island surrounded by an epistemic void. As in the narrative, most of the battlefield on the sketch is a blank space that constitutes a latent but constant threat. More than a question of orientation, the sketch thus becomes an image of the state of war. This is evident even in the positive elements of the sketch: the dotted line represents not just the path of Fabrice’s movement but also two different stages of knowledge. As he crosses the fossé in a straight line, he is aware of an infantry corps ahead of him. At this time, however, it is unclear whether they are French or enemy troops. Shortly after he has crossed the ditch he sees that the corps is part of the Grande Armée: “He veered to the right to join them.”108 The break in the straight line on the sketch thus marks an epistemic update that creates a swerve in space—a swerve that might easily have gone in the opposite direction had the soldiers turned out to be the enemy. Displaying the random movements of the elements inside the war matrix, the limited point of view of a participant, and the permanent change in the conditions of knowledge, Stendhal’s map constitutes a visual figure of the nonlinear operational logic of war. Above all else it is a map of the state of war in the year 1815.

On the Gradual Conception of the Novel while Dictating In Charterhouse Stendhal’s graphic imagination thus manifests itself in two distinct spatial forms: on the one hand, a conventional map drawn as a tool to manage and organize the novel; on the other hand, a situated representation tied to the perceptional sphere of a concrete individual. In each case text and image work in tandem as two parts of the same graphic impulse. It is the latter form, however, that gives Stendhal’s work its specific character. These representations constitute an anthropomorphic space either as it is experienced directly or as a reflection on the conditions of spatial representation as such. At the same time this space, like the military croquis, is constructed on the fly as part of a movement or process. Temporality is integral to the representation

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of space. One might think of both the autobiography and its novelistic extension as a series of “mappings,” that is, as the gradual, situated, open-ended construction of an imaginative world—be it remembered or invented—that develops on the ground, in real time. In his letters and notes Stendhal frequently expresses a profound distaste for organizing his plot in advance, for deciding on the developments of his text before he begins to write: “It chills me to write plans.”109 Instead his writing strategy consists of returning to where he left off, reading the last couple of pages he wrote or dictated the day before, and then continuing from there. In the margin of one of his printed copies of Charterhouse he notes, “I improvised while dictating; while I was dictating a chapter I never knew what would happen in the next chapter.”110 Dictating at a dizzying pace of twenty to thirty pages a day, he completed the manuscript in fifty-three days. While his claims to improvisation are somewhat exaggerated—he did on occasion make brief plans of the general outline of a work—the fast pace of the novel, the sudden changes, the vertiginous sense that anything might happen, all the elements that make up the unmistakably Stendhalian style, are nevertheless connected to his writing strategy. Like Fabrice’s, Stendhal’s field of vision extends only to the present circumstances, where each new event gives rise to the next. With the theory of knowledge production in mind that Kleist developed in his essay “On the Gradual Production of Thought while Speaking,” one might in the case of Charterhouse speak of the gradual conception of the novel while dictating: “The page I write gives me the idea for the next one: this is how the Char[treuse] was made.”111 The ending is not determined in advance, or at least it is subject to continual modifications. Having, in a different context, written a brief outline of an ending, Stendhal comments, “This, or what I will find at the end.” Elsewhere his literary plans end in a blank space: Plan The fog will gradually dissipate as I progress in the plan. I’ll see when I come to the next chapter.112

As Jacques Neefs points out, “the behavior of the text creates its own space, it adjusts its possible dispositions.”113 But with this method of writing Stendhal transposes features of the state of war onto the plane of writing itself. Undetermined and open-ended, the construction of the novel follows a situated exploratory course not unlike Fabrice’s gradual discovery of the topography of

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the battlefield at Waterloo. Only when Stendhal changes position and advances in his writing of the text does the narrative fog dissipate. For Stendhal the state of war and the condition of writing share a set of principles that can be found equally in his metapoetical commentary, in his novel, in his autobiography, and in his essay on the art of war. But where Fabrice falls victim to these principles, Stendhal turns them into a productive condition for novelistic composition. Brulard once again: “To write I was always waiting for the moment of inspiration. Only very late did someone correct this habit. [ . . . ] This foolishness has hurt the quantity of my work a lot. Still in 1806 I was waiting for the moment of inspiration to write. [ . . . ] If somebody had told me in 1795 when I spoke to them about my project of becoming a writer: ‘Write every day for two hours, whether you are inspired or not.’ Then I would have used ten years of my life effectively instead of wasting them like an idiot waiting for inspiration.”114 The moment of inspiration arises out of the concrete circumstances of the process of writing when an idea, a new possibility suddenly becomes visible as numerous elements shift position in ever-evolving constellations. Inspired writing, for Stendhal, depends on a textual environment of random elements and relations that in themselves are meaningless and unproductive but serve as its necessary material condition. By simply writing, without plan and uninspired, Stendhal can immerse himself in a textual flow that provides the raw material for his improvisations. The contingent state of war is here transformed into the productive and even necessary condition for the production of art. One might think of this reflection on the craft of the author as a rehearsal at the textual level of the Kantian argument on the sublime. As for Kant, the sublime for Stendhal is a cognitive effect that depends on freedom from danger. When he crosses the Great St. Bernard Pass with the French Army, as depicted in the sketch, he sees and hears the firing cannons from the fort at Bard: “Before I left my rock I noted that the cannonade at Bard made a terrible noise: it was sublime, but a bit too close to the danger. Instead of feeling pure enjoyment, the soul was still a bit too occupied holding its own.”115 The elevation and enjoyment of the mind is disturbed and diminished by the potential danger of a cannonball. This is perfectly in line with the traditional reading of Kant. Yet Stendhal’s work might cast some retrospective light on a passage in Kant that is often overlooked. In the further exposition of the sublime in §28 of the Critique of Judgment Kant makes a surprising claim. Discussing whether the statesman

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or the military commander is deserving of the greatest respect, he claims that the aesthetic judgment must decide for the latter because the commander shows “the indomitable nature of his feeling [Gemüt] through danger.” Kant continues, “Even war, when it is waged with order and respect for civil rights, has something sublime about it, and at the same time it makes the mentality of a people that wages it in this way all the more sublime the more dangers it is exposed to and against which it asserts itself courageously; whereas a long period of peace only makes the spirit of mere commerce reign and with it lowly self-interest, cowardice, and feebleness, and degrades the mentality of the people.”116 Kant regards warfare as a sublime phenomenon;117 but he also claims that the greater the level of danger, the greater the degree of sublimity.118 Through courage soldiers at all levels of the military echelon show that reason can assert itself in the midst of the dangerous whirl of the phenomenal world. That Kant chooses the verb behaupten, for this activity of assertion underlines the cognitive focus of his reflection. While courage is called upon in warfare, this courage is the result of a mental act, the power of using one’s head. For Kant war is the ultimate test of reason but also the condition of its empowerment. And such empowerment takes place at the national level. It is the Denkungsart, or mentality, of an entire people that is at stake in war.119 But there is a critical caveat: the subordinate clause stipulates that the chaos of war and its dangers must be contained and organized. Civil rights must not be infringed upon, and the war is to be conducted in an orderly fashion. Published in 1790, the Critique of Judgment articulates a conception of war based on the Kabinettskriege (cabinet wars) of the eighteenth century. The change in the nature of warfare under Napoleon did indeed make war into a national phenomenon that might potentially change the mentality of a people, but it also, as Clausewitz wrote, unshackled the element of war from its diplomatic fetters and now “marched forth in its raw violence rolling a monstrous mass of forces along with it.”120 Stendhal’s depiction of the Battle of Waterloo might be seen as an updated rebuttal of the Kantian argument. In the new kind of warfare, where the empire of chance has expanded beyond measure, war activates the sensorium to the utmost degree and exposes the participant to constant danger, but it has passed a threshold such that it no longer elevates the powers of reason. Overwhelmed by the force of war, Fabrice is deprived of all cognitive pleasure. Even in retrospect he lacks the concept of reason that forms the basis of Kant’s theory. Instead of empowering the faculty of reason, war has a debilitating effect; it overpowers reason and leaves it incapacitated.

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But if the state of war enfeebles the powers of the mind on the battlefield, the same conditions elevate them during the process of writing. When Stendhal retroactively advises himself to begin writing at random with no preconceived plan and simply to follow the thoughts that appear on the page as he writes, he transposes the contingent state of war onto the plane of writing and transforms it into a productive condition for thought. Safely outside the representation, Stendhal is at the same time exposed to and a part of a writing process that has a direct impact on his mind: it is elevated, he is inspired, he has “du génie.” Literary genius is here not a product of scrupulous planning; that is, it does not consist in a superior overview of the complexity of the fictional elements and its expert management. Nor is it a product of the divine breath that has informed the theory of inspiration since Plato.121 This latter conception is explicitly abandoned as the silly reverie of a youthful Romantic. Instead literary genius is a product of chance. To write well one must dive into the virtual reality of an environment suff used by randomness. Of course such an “inspirational sublime” is of a very different nature compared to the elevation of the mind in Kant. In §26 Kant explains that reason “demands totality and consequently comprehension in one intuition.”122 It is precisely such claims to comprehensiveness and unified representations—whose cartographic basis Farinelli has pointed out—that Stendhal left behind when he abandoned the utopian perspective desired by Balzac. The imagination, not reason, is elevated by the exposure to contingency, and, as his marginalia make clear, it provides local insights and flashes of inspiration that illuminate the immediate surroundings only, not the entire map of the text. At several levels Stendhal’s efforts are part of a quest for immediacy. The direct implication in immediate affairs is paradigmatic for his conception of war, for his simulations, for his sketches and narratives, and even for the process of writing. But such immediacy is precisely a media effect. It is an elaborate construction that depends on the careful recalibration of representational models. The entry of the readers onto the battlefield, the activation of their sensorium, the drawing of the experiential field, the depiction of the epistemic conditions and the operational logic of battle—all are a matter of design. Reinventing the formal conventions of cartography and narrative, Stendhal effects a rapprochement of two representational and epistemic regimes that usually stand in opposition. Mutually constitutive rather than mutually exclusive spatial and temporal media are fused into a series of cro-

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quis, or narrative maps. The chronotope of war in Stendhal’s work is the process of sketching—the act of representing in tempore, in situ. Fabrice’s inability to find a unified concept of the Battle of Waterloo is therefore emblematic of a new perception of war. With Stendhal, one might say, war can no longer be thought. Instead the state of war is translated into a series of textual techniques that in turn generate this state as a virtual experience. In contrast to the simulations of war games that primarily worked on the mind by generating experience in the form of pattern recognition, this textual simulation of war targets the sensorial apparatus. At a more general level one might detect a shift in the war simulation from epistemology to aesthetics in the original sense of the term. Not a tool to teach and optimize the management of war, Stendhal’s literary simulation generates a bombardment of random percepts that can only be sensed but not organized into patterns. No longer an added feature of the game, carefully written into the rule book and contained to the roll of the dice, contingency is elevated to an omnipotent and ubiquitous force in which intentional action, such as Fabrice’s killing of an enemy soldier, succeeds only by chance. The efforts at managing warfare through simulations are hereby undercut by Stendhal, who forcefully imprints on his readers the experience that war cannot be rationalized, organized, or managed. Running his textual nonlinear simulation a second time would create a new random walk across the battlefield with a different pattern, but it would offer no insight. A direct transmission into the body of random percepts, Stendhal’s war is an overpowering force that thwarts any attempt at comprehension.

Tolstoy: The Grand Illusion In the summer of 1812 the Russian tsar held a war council in the fortified camp at Drissa. Among those gathered around the maps that had been spread out on a table were the Russian colonel Toll, the Swedish general Armfeldt, the Prussian general Phull, who had designed the fortifications, and the Russian officer Bolkonsky. A report, which later turned out to be false, stated that the French were on the march and threatening the camp with a pincer movement. The council needed to decide on a plan of action, and a number of officers had begun to attack Phull’s plan to remain in the fortified camp, when the Prussian general rose to his feet and spoke in German: “ ‘You’ve messed it all up and ruined everything. You would have it you knew better than I did, and now you come running back for me to put things right. Well, nothing needs

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to be put right. All you have to do is carry on exactly according to the principles laid down by me,’ he said, rapping on the table with his bony fingers. ‘Where’s the difficulty? Nonsense—it’s child’s play!’ He went over to the map and began poking at it with a desiccated finger, jabbering away as he demonstrated that the effectiveness of the Drissa camp was immune to all contingencies, every development had been foreseen, and if the enemy did try a pincer movement, then the enemy would inevitably be destroyed.” At this an Italian general, who spoke no German, began asking questions in French. Phull, who in turn spoke little French, was offered a live translation by his aide Colonel Wolzogen, but, infuriated, he preferred to press on in German. When Wolzogen offered his own critical thoughts in French, Phull became “like a soldier lashing out at his own men in the heat of battle.” The Italian general continued in French, Armfeldt persisted in German, Toll translated into Russian, while Colonel Bolkonsky stood quietly and observed the debacle.123 The scene, as depicted by Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace, is emblematic of the larger concerns of the book. A fictional account of war and peace during the Napoleonic era, the work also stages a struggle over the media of war and the differing conceptions that accompany them. While Bolkonsky, the only invented character present at the war council, remains silent during the debate, War and Peace presents a vocal argument. As each historical character in Tolstoy’s description of the war council seeks to persuade his opponents not just of a concrete disposition but also of an underlying theory of war, Tolstoy—this is my claim—seeks to persuade the reader to accept his own specific conception of war. It is a remarkable fact about the French invasion of Russia in 1812 that it saw the clash not just of two empires but also of the two future leading theorists of war in the nineteenth century. On the French side Jomini, along with Stendhal, who would organize provisions on the retreat, followed the Grande Armée into the Russian heartland as an advisor to Napoleon, while Larisch slowly inched his way through Ukraine on the right flank. On the Russian side Clausewitz now served as an aide to General Phull after he had defected along with about twenty other high-ranking Prussian officers and entered Russian ser vice to fight Napoleon.124 Tolstoy had read widely among military theorists and historians while preparing his book, and he plays a number of positions and theories on war and its media against one another to test them and to point out their virtues and vices.125 War and Peace thus constitutes an argument. But to present this argument clearly and to persuade the readers of its validity, Tolstoy crafted a highly idiosyncratic formal struc-

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ture. Blending historical and fictional narratives, military theory as well as historiographical and media criticism, he developed his famous amalgam that defies conventional genre classifications. But more than simply juxtaposing heterogeneous genres and media, Tolstoy interrogates them as objects of knowledge. He asks us to consider how information is ordered on a map, how historical events are cast in a narrative mold, what truth-claims are made by fiction and by historiography, and what semiotic models they rely on. Operating at this metalevel, War and Peace is a highly complex and self-conscious examination of the poetics of war.

Critique of Cartographic Reason Throughout War and Peace war councils form the locus for a critical interrogation of military maps. What interests Tolstoy is the link between cartography, epistemology, and a certain theory of warfare. Before the Battle of Austerlitz, Prince Bolkonsky questions the Russian disposition that has been determined well in advance, because he has just visited the outposts and was unable to spot the enemy. “ ‘It doesn’t make any difference,’ was the curt response from Dolgorukov as he got up and spread a map on the table. ‘All eventualities have been foreseen.’ ”126 Once all the leading officers have arrived at the meeting, General Weierother, in command of the Austrian forces, jumps to his feet and crosses over “to a table on which an enormous map was spread out, depicting Brno and environs.”127 In a long monologue he lays out his complicated plan of attack. Dolgorukov, Weierother, and Phull all embody a theory of warfare that has the map as its emblem. Central to this theory is the exclusion of time, of probability, and of the antagonistic or, in the modern game-theoretical sense, strategic element of war.128 These exclusions are all highlighted when Weierother dismisses Langeron’s objection that his disposition is useless because it assumes knowledge of the enemy’s situation, when such knowledge is doubtful with the enemy on the move. “A certainty,” his intricate battle plan will be as effective on the terrain as on the map.129 For Tolstoy there is a correlation between the epistemic order of maps and the epistemology of war, a correlation that is most clearly evident in the acerbic satire of Phull. An “abrasive academic theorist,” Phull is at home only with his maps, where, in the contingent-free zone of abstraction, he can devise battle plans based on eighteenth-century tactics: “He had his science—the theory of oblique movement, which he had deduced from the wars of Frederick the Great, and everything he came across

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in today’s military history seemed to him the most preposterous barbarity, a series of ugly confrontations with so many blunders on both sides that these wars were not worthy of the name of war: they did not fit the theory and could not serve as objects of scientific study.”130 A historical figure, Phull nevertheless appears less as a character in Tolstoy’s hands than as the embodiment of the German general obsessed with theory; he is indeed “the perfect specimen of the type.”131 As his design of the fortification at Drissa emphasizes, Phull seeks to manage nineteenth-century war with a theory that harks back to the eighteenth century. To retain the scientific pretensions and mathematical rigor of these theories, he simply excludes a consideration of practice. Tolstoy pushes the top-down approach of a von Bülow or a Jomini beyond the extreme: “Phull was one of those theorists who love their theory so much that they lose sight of the aim of all theory, which is to work out in practice. He loved theory so much that he hated all practice and didn’t want to know about it. He even rejoiced in failure, because failure arose from practical infringements of his theory, which only went to show how right his theory was.”132 In other words, the map is not a representation of the territory; rather the territory is a representation of the map. Instead of re-presenting, theory de-presents the actual world, sucking all ontic content out of it and transferring it onto the plane of theory. The same goes for the dispositions that accompany the maps. At Borodino the battle is doubled and takes place in two spheres with alternate outcomes: “On paper, every one of these columns arrived in position exactly on time and destroyed the enemy. As always in such dispositions everything had been superbly thought through, but as with all dispositions not a single column arrived anywhere on time.”133 The split reveals the extreme nature of Tolstoy’s claim. Within the sphere of war, symbols lose all referential power. The glue that connects signifiers to their signifieds has been dissolved. Underneath the written dispositions and the printed maps, time has muddled the order of things and thus eroded the value of the symbols. Like playing chess without an opponent, the strategic maneuvers of the commanders do not take into account the changes in the setup wrought by the active initiative of the enemy. Further, symbolic representation relies on a massive reduction of complexity. In the case of war this is particularly problematic because here, as Tolstoy conceives it, “everything develops from the interplay of infinitely varied and arbitrary twists and turns!”134 Finally, symbols and, in particular, maps effect a transformation of the ontic status of information. Langeron objects that the

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reports all fall within the realm of probability, but when this information is visualized, when probability is transferred to the map, the status of that information is transformed. The uncertainty of the original information is excluded in the cartographic representation, with the effect that the power of the visualization—now you see the enemy’s position—seduces the viewer into believing in its accuracy. In Tolstoy’s view Phull’s desiccated finger tapping on the map touches a fantastic object: static, timeless, predictable, manageable, the map presents a negative image of war. For Tolstoy the military map is a grand illusion. Given this cartographic critique, it is to be expected that Tolstoy himself would refrain from inserting maps into the text. Compared to conventional historical accounts of the French invasion of Russia, War and Peace is virtually devoid of printed maps of any kind—with one exception. Several later editions as well as many translations of the work either leave out this map or place it in an appendix, but in the first complete edition it was placed squarely in the text itself (Figure 6.7). On this map you can see that there are four rectangular boxes, two with solid outlines and two with dotted outlines. The text in the latter reads, “The alleged position of the French” and “The alleged position of the Russians,” while the solid, vertical boxes indicate the actual position of the Russian and French forces during the Battle of 1812. Tolstoy inserts this map after a long passage in which he calls into question historians’ account of the battle; this map, then, serves as a corrective. After a prolonged examination of the historical sources and an actual trip to the site of the battle to inspect the terrain, Tolstoy concluded that the historians were wrong: the forces could not have been positioned where the historians claimed they were positioned. It is noteworthy, however, that on his own map Tolstoy does not eliminate the official account but instead superimposes on it his own version of the events. He produces two maps in one, and rather than merely depicting the actual location of the warring troops, this palimpsest serves the critical purpose of questioning the certainty and reliability of visual representation. During the transfer of information to the map, the uncertainty is expressly not excluded but remains an integral part of the map as represented by the dissolved outlines—the ghost image of another version of events. Such a dissolution of actual cartographic representation is a strategy Tolstoy also employs in his fictional narratives. In a passage early in War and Peace the battlefield is described in quasi-geometrical terms. But then the clear

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figure 6.7 Tolstoy’s plan of the alleged battle and of the actual battle. The rectangles drawn with solid lines depict the actual position of the troops; the ones drawn with dotted lines depict their alleged position. From Leo Tolstoy, Voina i Mir (Moskva: Tip. T. Ris, 1868–1869), 4: 239. RC8.T5885V, 1868. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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demarcations of space begin to break down: “A mere half-mile of empty space separated the two sides. The enemy held their fire, increasing the sense of that dark, menacing, mysterious, and intangible dividing line that exists between two warring armies.” In effect Tolstoy narrativizes the map, turning it into hazy outlines and blanks, until it disappears entirely shortly after Nikolay Rostov finds himself hopelessly lost and searching in vain for that “dividing line”: Further ahead a dark strip appeared that he couldn’t make out clearly, but he assumed it was the enemy. [ . . . ] Where were our men? Where were the French? He had no idea. There was no one in sight. He managed to free his leg and stood up. “Where’s that dividing line that separated us off so neatly?” he wondered, but he didn’t have an answer.135

The geometrical order of space that forms the invisible grounding of the commanders’ maps and the visible form of Phull’s fortifications at Drissa is dissolved into a series of psychological uncertainties as the narrative unfolds. In War and Peace the map is transformed from a useful tool of modern warfare into a literary motif that conjures forth a scientistic and positivistic theory of war. Maps in Tolstoy are never tools; they are always merely emblems of science and abstraction. Thus when Prince Andrey Bolkonsky early in the work pulls out his notebook and sketches a map of the troops from his vantage point on a battery, the narrator quickly links his mapping activity with his mental activity. Used to watching large-scale maneuvers, he “automatically took a generalized view of the impending operations. He only imagined things on a grand scale.”136 Maps provide a certain order of things, but they also transmit this order to the mind of the people who manipulate it. Thereby the military map seduces its viewers into believing that war is manageable. In opposition to this cartographic reason displayed by Bolkonsky, Phull, and the other German-speaking military commanders, Tolstoy seeks to persuade the reader of his own understanding of war—an understanding, however, that trades on one of the Prussian thinkers from whom Tolstoy wanted to dissociate himself: Carl von Clausewitz.

Clausewitz in Translation While the theories of Jomini had dominated Russian thought in the first decades after the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, toward the middle of the

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century the leading members of the educational elite embraced the work of Clausewitz. First N. V. Medem and then L. I. Zeddeler praised his philosophical approach to war and contrasted it with the systematizing tendency of French military thought, while M. I. Dragomirov would later translate Clausewitz into Russian.137 This favorable reception stands in stark contrast to the explicit reception Clausewitz receives in War and Peace. On August 25, 1812, the evening before the Battle of Borodino, Clausewitz appears as a character in the text when Bolkonsky overhears the conversation between him (the second voice) and Wolzogen (the first voice): “The war must be extended inside space. This is a view I cannot esteem highly enough,”—said the one voice. “Indeed,”—said the second one, “and the goal is only to weaken the enemy, and then the loss of private individuals cannot be taken into account.” “Precisely,” confirmed the first voice.

As Bolkonsky’s ensuing tirade against German theory makes clear, Clausewitz is placed in the same category as Phull. As Phull’s aide, Clausewitz was himself well aware of the danger that his contemporaries might think of him in that way,138 but by the time Tolstoy was writing Clausewitz’s own thought was widely known. So why the miscategorization? The passage above is one of the very few in War and Peace that are rendered in German. But it is not idiomatic German: “Der Krieg muss im Raum verlegt werden. Der Ansicht kann ich nicht genug Preis geben,”—govoril odin. —“O ja,”—skazal drugoj goloc,—“der Zweck ist nur den Feind zu schwächen, so kann man gewiss nicht den Verlust der Privat-Personen in Achtung nehmen.” —“O ja,”—podtverdil pervyj golos.139

Aside from the curiously unidiomatic German, Tolstoy’s footnote translation uses an accusative “perenecena v prostranstvo” (extended in space) and not a dative “im Raum” (inside space). As Friedrich Doepner has pointed out, Tolstoy most likely lifted this phrase from a passage in Clausewitz’s On War and incorporated it into his own text without making the necessary grammatical changes.140 Likewise Clausewitz’s central concept of tact—a curiosity

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in the Russian language in its military sense—appears in Tolstoy’s text. Napoleon is characterized by “his great tact and experience of war [s svoim bol’shim taktom i opytom voiny].”141 Indeed there are a number of passages that bear a striking similarity to the passages in Clausewitz. Raymond Aron points to the description of Phull, for example, which closely mirrors Clausewitz’s own sharp critique in his history of the Russian campaign.142 But the explicit rejection of Clausewitz covers up not merely a familiarity with the historical and philosophical texts of the Prussian thinker but also the fact that Tolstoy to a large extent adopted his central ideas.143 When Tolstoy splits war into two distinct ontic realms—the symbolic battle that takes place on the map and in the dispositions and the actual one that takes place in the field—he rehearses an argument Clausewitz makes in one of his definitions of friction, which is precisely “the only concept that at a general level indicates the difference between real war and war on paper.”144 As Clausewitz in book 1 of On War first imagines war in its pure form, namely “absolute war,” but then expressly discards this concept in order to turn to an examination of the actual practice of war, with all the constraints and complications that entails, Tolstoy evokes a frictionless conception of war only to assail this conception with an insistent display of the ubiquity of friction. Bolkonsky’s observations following the war council with Phull state so explicitly: Prince Andrey listened to this cacophony, these assumptions, plans, rebuttals, and exclamations, and he was amazed at what they were all saying. Ideas which he had long held and often thought about during his military ser vice—that there was no such thing as a science of warfare and never could be, and that therefore there could be no such thing as military genius—now struck him as completely true and self-evident. “What kind of theory and science can there be when the conditions and circumstances are unknown and cannot be determined, and the strengths of the warring parties are even more indeterminable? [ . . . ] What kind of science can there be when, as in all practical matters, nothing can be determined, and everything depends on an incalculable number of conditions whose significance is suddenly revealed in a single moment that no one can predict in advance.”145

For Bolkonsky warfare is an epistemic condition in which knowledge is inherently uncertain and in constant flux. Given the similarity in Tolstoy’s description of the war council with that of Clausewitz that opened chapter 2, in

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which he himself regards the incoming reports with great skepticism, it is tempting to see Bolkonsky as Clausewitz incognito—Prussian military theory in Russian disguise. Especially since he continues to stress the psychological aspect, soldier morale, as the decisive factor in battle. Yet Bolkonsky, and with him Tolstoy, seems at the same time to be engaged in a covert dispute against Clausewitz,146 for the refutation of the existence of “military genius” goes directly against Clausewitz’s list of measures to contain the impact of chance and his general attempts to find ways of managing the middle realm of probabilities that lies between geometrical certainty and sheer contingency. The position in the military discourse on war that most closely approximates the epistemological understanding of war that Tolstoy entertains is that of Berenhorst and his “empire of chance.” For Tolstoy the operational logic of a battle, its course, is determined by “an infinite number of freely operating forces . . . and this course can never be known in advance and it never coincides with the direction of any one particular force.” Therefore “every single battle— Tarutino, Borodino, Austerlitz—works out differently from the way it was scheduled by the planners. This is inevitable.”147 In an inversion of military theories that exclude friction, Tolstoy’s military theory excludes any control and management of war by the generals at the higher end of the military echelon. Their failure is just as inevitable as their success is for Phull. Bolkonsky thus serves as a figure that passes through the various positions on the spectrum of the theory of war in the military discourse of the time as he migrates from one extreme to the other. While at the beginning War and Peace he explains the concept of strategy to his father and adopts a cartographic view consonant with a von Bülow or a Jomini, he moves on to a Clausewitzian position that appreciates the impact of friction, only to end with the view of war as the realm of ubiquitous contingency, the pure randomness of Berenhorst. And yet in spite of his profound skepticism with regard to the management of war, Bolkonsky not only believes that moral factors decide battles; he also suggests a principle of action, for while “plans count for nothing [ . . . ] everything depends on how you react to the unexpected and unpredictable enemy action.”148 Meaningful action can take place only on location, in time as events unfold. It is here, “in the thick of things,” when individuals act subconsciously at the spur of the moment, that battles are decided, not in the war councils.149 With Tolstoy’s emphasis on friction, psychology, warfare as a state of knowledge, and, finally, tact, it appears that Clausewitz’s ideas, in whatever form Tolstoy encountered them, constitute an important subtext to War

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and Peace that Tolstoy both radicalizes and at the same time seeks to cover up. Two agendas here come into conflict. On the one hand, Tolstoy presents an analysis of war as a phenomenon, and he repeatedly describes it as an epistemic condition, a complex state of uncertainties and randomness in continual flux. As the most insightful and comprehensive philosophical analysis of war, On War would offer much support for Tolstoy’s own views. On the other hand, Clausewitz was Prussian. Given Tolstoy’s nationalistic stamp of the frictionless theory of war, Clausewitz did not fit the stereotype and was scientized accordingly. Conceptually consonant but nationalistically at variance, Clausewitz is openly marginalized, while his ideas form the concealed foundation of Tolstoy’s theory of war—everywhere present but nowhere seen.

Fiction, Friction, Fact A conglomerate of critical historiography, philosophy of history, theory of warfare, and fictional narratives, War and Peace brings together disciplines that rarely coexist in one work. From the very beginning the juxtaposition of genres left readers baffled. The well-known judgments of its more distinguished readers, such as Flaubert—“He repeats himself ! And he philosophizes!”—and Henry James, who famously placed it in the category of “large loose baggy monsters” and “fluid puddings,” address the idiosyncratic form of the work. So does one of the first reviews, written in 1865, when only the beginning had been published. The anonymous critic puts the question directly: “What is this? To which literary genre can we ascribe it? What is it? Fiction, pure creation, or reality?”150 As a response to the general bafflement with the formal hybridity, Tolstoy published a brief essay in 1868, before the final installments of the work came out, in which he offered a seemingly cryptic answer: “What is ‘War and Peace’? It is not a novel, nor is it a poem, still less a historical chronicle. ‘War and Peace’ is what the author wanted and could express in the form in which it was expressed.”151 In other words, the peculiarity of the form was not merely intentional; the odd design was necessary for Tolstoy’s agenda. To close in on what this agenda was, one must examine in some detail the strangeness of the work’s poetics. From a Bakhtinian point of view, Andrew Wachtel has described the form as an “intergeneric dialogue” that brings into play several distinct genres— the fictional, the historical, and the metahistorical—that do not blend with one another but remain distinct forms of discourse within the text. In the mind of the reader, however, these discourses are perceived synoptically, but only as

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contrastive modes of narration. Thus “this mode of presentation preserves the separate perspectives of historian and novelist. Instead of blurring together we get two sharp images—a double exposure, at it were.”152 As an example Wachtel offers the telling of the Battle of Borodino. Here grand historical statements are followed by a fictional account of Pierre Bezukhov roaming the battlefield. For Wachtel the different accounts show the impossibility of fusing the two perspectives, “and that is the point. Fictional and historical narration present different perspectives and different truths—equal, perhaps, but separate, and presented here in dialogical contrast.”153 The metahistorian, for his part, adopts an Archimedean stance at a point outside of time and space, from which everything can be observed, analyzed, and criticized. Gary Saul Morson, on the other hand, while also writing from a Bakhtinian perspective, has argued that neither Tolstoy’s historian nor his metahistorian is trying to tell the truth of the past, “wie es eigentlich gewesen” (as it really was). Instead Tolstoy’s use of absolute statements like “in reality” is merely rhetorical, and he uses it only negatively to assert laws of ignorance. Thus in War and Peace “the absence of a privileged vantage point is stressed; no one, including the author, can know the past.”154 Insightful as Wachtel’s and Morson’s analyses are, I would like to suggest that the fictional narratives in War and Peace take on a somewhat different function. Let us take a closer look at the Battle of Borodino and the relation between the different modes of narration. Chapter 19 opens in the voice of the historian: “On the 24th the battle of the Shevardino redoubt was fought; on the 25th not a shot was fired by either side; on the 26th came the battle of Borodino.”155 Immediately following is a critique of the historiographical works that Tolstoy had consulted. The central questions are who decided that the battle should take place at Shevardino and at Borodino and where the exact location of the battle was. Tolstoy first relates the traditional account, which explains that the Russians chose the site of Borodino in advance because it offered the best terrain advantages. But, he continues, “this is the historical version of events, and it is totally wrong, as is clearly evident to anyone who is prepared to look into the matter.”156 He then proceeds to offer his own version, claiming, first, that the location was entirely unexpected, that it was not chosen but simply forced upon the Russians due to the unforeseen unfolding of events, and second, based on a close reading of the historical sources as well as a personal inspection of the battlefield, that the Russian and French troops were located elsewhere, as indicated on the map in Figure 6.7. He concludes,

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“And so the battle of Borodino was fought entirely differently [ . . . ] from the way it is normally described.”157 This apodictic statement has nothing ironic or parodic about it. Through a critical examination of historical sources, Tolstoy pronounces an ultimate statement about the past. Wachtel is surely correct to say that Tolstoy adopts an Archimedean point of view that states not what might have been the case but, truly, “wie es eigentlich gewesen.” But Tolstoy adds a sentence that reveals the intention of his historical revisionism: the battle was fought differently from the way it is normally described by historians “(who try to hide the blunders of our generals and thereby belittle the glorious achievements of the Russian army and the Russian people).”158 The critique of the Battle of Borodino is part of a larger critique of historiography in War and Peace that seeks to lay bare both its ideological and its structural problems. According to this general critique, historical narratives, while they do depict time and change, are post hoc rationalizations constructed in hindsight when the battle is a fait accompli. They randomly assign causal power to a given set of events in order to make it fit with the ending. With this tightly connected chain of cause and effect, historians exclude both the multiplicity of events—the “infinitesimally small forces” of history159—as well as the uncertainty of their development during the time of battle. In Tolstoy’s conception this kind of narrative, despite appearances, does not represent time at all. Rather historians turn narratives into static maps. They are military strategists in reverse, drawing causal lines in history to fit their knowledge of the outcome.160 This reduction of complexity is further aggravated by the focus on individual commanders, for it excludes the hundred million contingent factors that Bolkonsky identifies as the essence of battle. The critique by Tolstoy’s metahistorian in chapter 19 thus contains two separate claims: first, a claim about the facts of the past—the where, the what, the who of the Battle of Borodino; second, and more important for Tolstoy, the claim about the facts of the past entails a claim about the state of war, that is, not just what happened but how it happened, how the phenomenon of war operates. This second claim is explicitly viewed as a problem of poetics. “The ancients,” Tolstoy writes, “have left us examples of epics with all the historical interest focused on particular heroes, and nowadays we cannot get used to the idea that this kind of history is meaningless at the present stage of human development”161—meaningless because epic history writing by definition excludes any consideration of the state of war. Instead of a narrative mode that

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regards war as a fait accompli decided by the superior strategic maneuvers of one of the commanders, Tolstoy seeks a different narrative mode that is able to depict war as the ongoing process of the collision of contingent events. Rather than having separate truths or no truth content at all, the historical and the fictional narratives are linked by a common claim about the state of war. The purpose of fictional narratives is to persuade us, the readers, of this claim through a mode more powerful and more convincing than that of an epic counternarration or an abstract metacritique. Let us return to the Battle at Borodino, this time as fiction.

The Power of Persuasion From his vantage point at the top of a mound, Pierre Bezukhov has a splendid view of the battlefield bathed in the slanting rays of the sun. For Pierre the battle is literally a spectacle. He has driven out in his carriage because he “just felt like having a look.”162 As a voyeur Pierre has found the ideal spot on the mound. Above and separated from the events, this location, which Pierre shares with the Russian commander Kutuzov and the staff officers, corresponds to the epic stance taken by the historians whose narratives Tolstoy has just criticized. But Pierre does not keep his position for long. He soon feels the urge to be down there “amidst all the smoke, the glinting bayonets, the movement, and the noise.”163 From the grand-scale overview, the narrative follows Pierre into the midst of things, into the epistemic thicket of infinitesimal forces. His fascination at first remains detached as he strolls around with an uncomprehending smile on his face, but as he happens upon the Rayevsky redoubt— the site of some of the most intense fighting during the battle—it becomes impossible to maintain an attitude of detachment: Suddenly something happened; the young officer cried out, doubled up and sat down on the ground, like a bird shot on the wing. Pierre’s vision blurred, everything looked weird and hazy. The cannonballs came whistling down one after another, smashing into everything—breastwork, soldiers, cannons. These sounds had barely registered on Pierre before but now he could hear nothing else. [ . . . ] A cannonball flew past him, then another, and another, striking in front of him, on both sides and behind. Pierre charged downhill. “Where am I?” he wondered, when suddenly he was there beside the green ammunition-boxes. He hesitated: should he run back or go on? Suddenly

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a terrific bang sent him reeling backwards down to the ground. At the same instant he was dazzled by a great searing flash, and deafened by a terrible hissing sound and a thunderous roar that banged in his ears.164

The intensification of sense impressions reaches a point where the detached attitude breaks down. No longer a spectator Pierre is turned into an actor implicated in the events. The story of Clausewitz’s imagined soldier in On War is here taken to its ultimate conclusion: the danger zones that in the Prussian fiction impact the sensorium of the recruit and impede the functioning of the faculties of the mind are in the Russian fiction transformed into a literal bombardment of the senses. Where Pierre until now has barely registered the dangers that surrounded him, the cannonade jolts his sensorium into action, but it immediately overloads and shuts down. Hissing, screeching, dazzling, blinding, Tolstoy’s war is a phenomenon that does not merely disrupt logical thought; it is an experiential state that even the senses are unfit to handle. This scene is the second of a curious double take Tolstoy makes of Pierre’s experience of battle. One day earlier he had also climbed a mound and enjoyed the vista of the battlefield sprawling before him like an “amphitheater,”165 before descending to roam the fields. Here he encounters Bolkonsky, and a discussion on the subject of war arises. While Pierre claims “that war is similar to chess,”166 Bolkonsky lectures him on his theory of the hundred million contingent factors. The epic perspective linked to the view from the mound is questioned at a theoretical level. The second take, on the day of battle, is thus a replay of Bolkonsky’s theory of war, but now played in an experiential mode. In Tolstoy’s account the Battle of Borodino displays a correspondence between the metahistorical critique, the discourse on the theory of war, and the fictional narrative—three successive modes of discourse that cast reflections back and forth on each other. But in this modal interplay the fictional narrative is possessed of a power the others do not share in the same measure: the power of persuasion. This conception of fiction goes back at least to his Sevastopol Stories, written in the 1850s. Let us look at the first of these stories before we return to the unconscious Pierre on the battlefield of Borodino. At the surface level Sevastopol in December is concerned with the Crimean War (1853–1856), but it quickly becomes evident that the text is more interested in the reader than in the war. Employing the second-person form of address, vy (you), the narrator invites the reader into the story in order to expose

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him or her to a series of sensations. This narrative program is hinted at as soon as the reader arrives on the boat from the northern shore: “When you realize that you are in Sevastopol, then by necessity a feeling of courage, of pride enters your soul, the blood begins to run faster in your veins.”167 The story then unfolds in a number of directions about your movements in fictional space and the various sense impressions you receive: “You walk into the great meeting hall. As soon as you have opened the door, you are suddenly hit by the sight and smell of forty or fifty sick people who have had limbs amputated.”168 The powerful impression of a scene of amputation is intensified as you walk up to the bastion. A cannon is fired next to you, and “suddenly the terrible roar, which impacts not just your organs of hearing but your entire being, hits you to such an extent that your entire body shudders.”169 At one point Tolstoy even depicts the expression of horror in your face. The main character of the story is thus an empty body, an ambulant sensorium occupied precisely by no one such that the reader might all the more easily slip into it. The story seeks to generate as immediately and as powerfully as possible the experience of war, and to do so it wraps the reader in a fictional skin, which it brings to the location with the greatest intensity of impressions. The purpose is twofold. First, the story effects an emotional transformation. After you have experienced the dangers of war and seen the intransigent defenders of Sevastopol in situ (“na samom meste”), you return from the bastion with an elevated soul. The concrete fictional scenario works as a catalyst that transforms the initial feelings of dread, fear, and anguish into a feeling of pride or defiance. But the story also effects an epistemic transformation. Toward the end the narrator relates the heroic story of Vladimir Alekseyevich Kornilov, an experienced commander and one of the principal organizers of the defense, who said to his troops that they would all die but Sevastopol would not fall, to which they all replied, “We will die! Hurrah!” “Only now,” the narrator claims, that is, only after having experienced vicariously the impressions of war generated by the narrative, is this story transformed “from a beautiful historical legend” into an “authentic fact.”170 In other words, what a conventional story could not persuade us of, this emotional simulation can. Such is the claim, at any rate. By means of real sense impressions generated by a fictive discourse, Sevastopol in December converts legends into fact. Having effected this conversion, the narrator ushers the reader back onto the boat and sails you out of the simulation and back into actuality with a new understanding of war implanted in body and mind.

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Tolstoy’s remarkable claim in this text is that only fiction has the power to persuade readers of the facts of war. These epistemic pretensions are not undermined but further bolstered by the ambiguity of the genre. There is a journalistic and documentary feel to the story, and Tolstoy originally intended to publish it in a military rather than a literary journal.171 The power of the story is augmented by a generic osmosis, by a semiotic rubbing-off effect that arises from the juxtaposition of two distinct genres. Trading on the implied real-world reference and objectivity of the documentary style, the story seeks to provoke an intergeneric transfer of referentiality in order to imbue the fictional discourse with real-world reference. At the end of the second of the Sevastopol Stories the narrator states unashamedly, “The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be magnificent—is truth.”172 Sevastopol Stories presents in miniature an early version of the principle that governs the structure of War and Peace. Here too, in much larger format, war is cast as an explosion of sense impressions, and the text effects a transfer of referentiality from one genre to another. Instead of the somewhat artificial second-person address, however, a fictional character—be it Nikolay Rostov, Andrey Bolkonsky, or Pierre Bezukhov—serves as the extension of the reader’s skin, eyes, and ears that wind up in the thick of things.173 As in Stendhal, the shift from the cartographic overview to the situated description thus entails an exchange from an observant-conceptual level to a sensing-experiential one. Tolstoy later acknowledged his debt to Stendhal, who, he said, had made him understand war: “Reread the narrative of the Battle of Waterloo in La Chartreuse de Parme. Who, before him, had described war like that, i.e. as it really is.”174 For Tolstoy, the real of war is a situated sense experience.175 An absolute disjunction of perspectives therefore obtains. As he severs the link between the map and the referent, Tolstoy severs any connection between the commander’s perspective from the heights and the events on the ground.176 Napoleon, standing on a mound overlooking the battlefield, sees nothing but smoke and fog, receives false reports, and issues a stream of orders “which either had been carried out, or were not carried out at all, and never could have been carried out.”177 The semiotic chains sent into the field are unable to latch on to any stable element in the constant flux that subverts any possibility of distanced, semiotic management. On the ground, however, immediate experience is pushed to the limit. Pierre’s sensorium is bombarded with impressions until it shuts down and he

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passes out. Tolstoy’s war is a phenomenon that at its most intense forms the limit not just of thought, as in Stendhal, but also of sensation. Pierre of course comes to, and the attack on the senses resumes. In this way the state of war as an epistemic theory—the hundred million contingent factors—is transformed into an experiential state that can be grafted onto the reader. After reading the scene, it is, as Balzac desired, “as if you had participated in it.” This at least was the experience of one of the French nineteenth-century readers of the text. Noting first that Tolstoy describes the battle not in itself but through the effects it has on the fictional characters, E. de Cyon continues, “These impressions are analyzed with such a power of truth that we participate ourselves in the horrors which Andrey experiences during the massacres at Schöngraben and Austerlitz. . . . It is precisely in passages of this sort that Tolstoy attains the peak of his art. Not content merely to reproduce all the details of the drama, external or personal, he communicates to the reader the emotions in which the drama takes place, he gives us the atmosphere surrounding the characters and we understand the influences under which they act because we are affected by them too.”178 De Cyon’s experience of projection and implication in the world conjured by the text results in an affective transfer from the fictional character or avatar to himself. He participates in the battle only by proxy, but because the text cloaks him in the skin of Bolkonsky, it imparts to his body the emotional and sensorial responses of being there. For Tolstoy this kind of embodied knowledge is crucial for the understanding of war. In his theoretical reflections in the epilogue, he divides the realm of knowledge in two: “reasoning” and “experience.” In the case of real-life phenomena the latter “verifies the results of reasoning.”179 This verification may be regarded as a cognitive process, but it is not a conscious one. Thus Tolstoy’s injunction against eating of the “Tree of Knowledge.” Rather, he states, “the only activity that bears any fruit is subconscious activity.”180 As Balzac’s letters and diary entries offered the theory of a fiction that never came into existence, Tolstoy’s work includes the theory of itself, for these claims evidently reflect back on the generic structure of War and Peace. The fictional narratives depict the state of war as an experiential state that can be passed on to the reader while bypassing conscious, logical reasoning. In other words, through a simulated experience, these narratives “verify” the theory of the state of war that Tolstoy voices in declarative sentences elsewhere. We, the readers, are to be persuaded without even knowing that someone is arguing with us. The fictional elements are thus integral to the overall argument Tolstoy presents.

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But it seems that Tolstoy is trying to persuade us of two separate things. One is the operational dynamic of battle as an epistemic condition. But he also takes Thiers, Mikhaylovsky-Danilevsky, and others to task for misrepresenting the facts of the past. Unlike these historians, Tolstoy, the historian, knows exactly what happened. These separate claims are difficult to reconcile. At once Tolstoy adopts the cartographico-epic perspective from the mound—“The real version is this”181—and the situated perspective on the ground, where he is at pains to show that everything happens “in a way that totally transcends our imagination and powers of description.”182 The omniscient point of view collides with a nescient one, a point of view that is not merely agnostic but that amounts to a kind of perspectival atheism: for the human mind, war is in principle unknowable. Following his own theory Tolstoy himself falls prey to the cartographic illusion.183 Between the genres an epistemic dissonance arises. In a critique of Clausewitz, Jomini once stated that Clausewitz first proved the impossibility of all military theory and then proceeded to present his own. A misreading of Clausewitz, this critique applies well to War and Peace. In this work the fictional narratives do not verify or persuade but contradict and dissuade us from accepting Tolstoy’s ultimate statements on history. Indeed the fictional war narratives offer the most powerful means of persuading the reader of the contingency of the state of war and the impossibility of transforming it into an epic narration with facts organized clearly and distinctly. They constitute the negative image of epic narration, the excluded element: war as a matrix of pervasive uncertainty structured by contingent events. Let us revisit Tolstoy’s map. Here we can see the two contradictory arguments literally mapped out for us. On the one hand, Tolstoy claims with apodictic certainty to know the “actual position” of the armies. On the other hand, the fact that the “alleged position” remains on the map constructs a visual representation of two competing views that highlights the epistemic intricacies of war. The map takes on the structure of a Kippfigur, or reversible figure. It embodies both of Tolstoy’s arguments but in the form of mutual exclusion. Either you see the omniscient knowledge claim, or you see the epistemic friction, but at no time can you see both at once.184 Readers of War and Peace have tended to be more persuaded by the description of the state of war than by the assertions about historical facts. A notable response was published in 1869–1870 by General M. I. Dragomirov in a series of articles later collected under the title “Count Tolstoy’s War and

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Peace from a Military Point of View.”185 According to Dragomirov, the difference between Tolstoy’s text and that of conventional historiography is that between “a landscape and a topographical map.”186 The former offers less, only a single point of view, but it is aligned with the human visual and mental perspective, whereas the latter offers multiple points of view on a vast area but has nothing in common with ordinary perception. Against the foil of these cartographic narratives in which “everything is dead and inanimate” Tolstoy creates animated characters: “These fictional characters live and act before you in such a way that invaluable practical lessons may be learned from their activity by anyone who has decided to devote himself to military affairs and who does not forget in peacetime for what he is preparing himself.”187 Though they are merely fictions or “lies,” they “illumine that internal side of the battle better than the majority of multitome descriptions of wars in which faceless characters pass fleetingly by.”188 For Dragomirov fact and fiction trade places. Only through Tolstoy’s fictive narratives can the state of war be adequately described. While theoretical claims, like those of the French military thinker Trochu about the complexity of managing troops on the battlefield, may be true enough in themselves, they are not persuasive: “To understand the profound signification and the practical sense of Trochu’s advice, one must have experienced oneself the baptism of fire or, alternatively, have spent a long time penetrating and reflecting on the sketchy traces that every military hurricane leaves in its wake in literature in the form of memoires written by eyewitnesses, instructions from participants with a more powerful mind, etc. The story by count Tolstoy carves this advice into the mind with ineffaceable traces, precisely because he presents it in images.”189 For Dragomirov, Tolstoy’s fictions have the power of persuasion because they impart to the reader a virtual experience of the conditions of war. The fact of the fiction is thus not a historical one; its reference point is not a specific element, such as the contested location of the Russian and the French troops. It is instead the general operative logic of warfare and its impact on the sensorium. The state of war emerges out of and is embodied in the poetics of fiction, and if converted into a traditional propositional mode, it will be lost in translation. An abstract conception may be conveyed, but a deeper understanding requires the immediacy of an animated virtual world. To put it succinctly, turning friction into fact is the prerogative of fiction. Accordingly Dragomirov states that the fictional war narratives of War and Peace would be “one of the most useful additions to any theoretical course on the art of war.”190

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That Dragomirov turns War and Peace into an educational training device is not too surprising given his intellectual heritage. A student and later translator of Clausewitz, Dragomirov rehearses the argument that friction is a matter of poetics and that fictive examples, in this respect, can have a greater facticity than historical ones. Where Tolstoy covertly accepted and installed several basic tenets of Clausewitz’s theory of war, Dragomirov’s text offers the more curious case of Clausewitz vicariously reading Tolstoy and openly incorporating his fiction into On War.191 Through the mediation of Dragomirov, it becomes evident that for both thinkers, when it comes to how war functions, to its operational logic, fiction is a crucial mode to convey “wie es eigentlich gewesen.”

Intergeneric Osmosis With Roland Barthes, one might speak of the production of certain “reality effects” in War and Peace, but effects that differ markedly from what he describes as one of the hallmarks of realist fiction. For Barthes the effect is predicated on the presence of a seemingly superfluous, insignificant, that is, nonsignifying, detail that escapes the narrative web of signification and thus engenders a referential illusion whereby the text appears to refer to the actual world outside of language.192 Given Tolstoy’s critique of signs—be they narrative or cartographic—it appears that he seeks to evade the fictionality of his own fictions with a double injection of the real. First, as I have tried to show, the poetics of the simulation implicates the reader by virtually inserting his or her actual sensorium into the fictive world. In this form Tolstoy’s reality effect is not a cerebral one that arises from the failure of hermeneutics, the failure to incorporate a single element into an interpretive schema, but a visceral one that pulls the reader in and produces actual physiological responses. And unlike Barthes’s theory, the effect springs from the very organizing structure of the text, not from a marginal object. The second injection is more subtle and involves the larger generic structure of War and Peace. As is the case with Tolstoy’s relation to Clausewitz, his relation to historiography is an uneasy one. While the fictional narratives appear to contradict the epistemic claims made by traditional historiography (as well as those made by Tolstoy), they seem to adopt their ontological claims. In other words, the juxtaposition of genres in War and Peace allows Tolstoy to trade on the ontological, referential claims inherent in the historical discourse. Shifting back and forth between the historical and the fictional discourse,

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Tolstoy effects an intergeneric osmosis in which the implied real-world reference of history migrates into the fictional discourse and imbues it with real-world reference.193 Where historians are accused of abusing their referential mode and fabricating fictions instead of facts, Tolstoy’s narratives serve as the corrective that provides facts through fiction. The map serves as the figure of this referential transfer. Where Phull’s maps are supposedly revealed to be fictions deprived of any kind of referential power, in the juxtaposition with the fictional narratives their referential claim is taken over by the latter. There is thus a greater similarity between Tolstoy and Phull than Tolstoy would probably like to admit. When Phull sensed that his plan of the Drissa fortification would be abandoned, “he was visibly in despair that the one chance of putting his theory to the test on a colossal scale and demonstrating its infallibility to the whole world was slipping away from him.”194 In like fashion, but from an opposite standpoint, Tolstoy seeks to demonstrate his own theory of war through fictional narratives of practice. In this way fiction comes to “verify” or demonstrate Tolstoy’s theory of war not just through its impact on the reader but also by its association with the historical discourse and its emblem, the map, from which he overtly distances himself. Viewed synoptically the interspersed historical chapters and the maps scattered across the work function as so many injections of the real—reminders that in this work too Tolstoy’s main hero is truth. Besides the apparent disparity between the different discourses and representational models in the text, the general bafflement over War and Peace is due to the complexity of their interrelation. Indeed the peculiar poetics of the work may be seen as a textual strategy that seeks to forge into the formal structure of the book a composite model that combines the freedom to invent a fictional world with the power of real-world reference. No wonder readers were puzzled, and no wonder they could not find an appropriate name for such an entity. Neither could Tolstoy. As he wrote, “It is not a novel, nor is it a poem, still less a historical chronicle. ‘War and Peace’ is what the author wanted and could express in the form in which it was expressed.” Toward the end of War and Peace Tolstoy makes the claim that all texts that depict the interactions of human beings must re-create a necessary condition, namely “the dynamic temporal wholeness of the event itself.”195 Here thereby sums up the task of the European war novel in the nineteenth century. What guides the texts of Balzac, Stendhal, and Tolstoy is an interest in war as a

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phenomenon in itself, a phenomenon governed by a highly complex operative dynamic. For these writers traditional maps exclude this dynamic from its surface of representation. The literary treatment of war therefore develops as a counterdiscourse, a reaction to the wars themselves and also to the construction of war in what had become one of its principal media. The cartographic image thus becomes the source of a productive tension that shapes the poetics of the novel, for one of its principal goals is to re-create the state of war with textual means and to reinstate it as the ineliminable condition of all action. In the process cartography is refashioned and reappropriated by Stendhal, who brings it down to earth to make it part of a narrative mode that finds its tertium comparationis in the croquis—the situated, implicated, perspectival mapping of immediate surroundings; and by Tolstoy, who dismisses the map with one hand and exploits its referential power with the other. The war novels of the nineteenth century thus constitute an archive of the various conceptions of the state of war as well as of the representational modes through which they are articulated. In Balzac this archive remains hypothetical; it is an enumeration only, a laying out of possibilities. But beginning with Stendhal these modes are realized and played out against one another. At this level historical facts have ceased to be an issue. What is at stake is the proper conception of the phenomenon of war itself. And with War and Peace, the entire archive is animated. Tolstoy rehearses the spectrum of theories of the state of war originally formulated by Berenhorst, Clausewitz, Phull, and Jomini and stages them in a media conflict. Here the development of a viable poetics of war escalates into a war of poetics. The challenge that Berenhorst formulated at the end of the eighteenth century and that military minds sought to meet with probability, cartography, texts, and dice, the literary simulations of the nineteenth century show to be insurmountable. In the literary imagination war remains an empire of chance at once unmanageable and incomprehensible, and the carefully constructed fictional texts are designed specifically to convey this fundamental argument as effectively as possible.

Conclusion The Disorder of Things

he state of war is articulated in a diverse range of forms, materials, and genres that all, with shifting emphases, respond to the disappearance of a secure foundation of knowledge. Out of the flat geometrical order, war emerges as a fully formed three-dimensional world governed by an operational dynamic that allows only hypothetical scenarios, average truths, a spectrum of probabilities. In its tremendous complexity, war is a blurry object in which a pervasive disorder obtains. But even as some seek to exclude the state of war from the realm of epistemology—be it in philosophical and military treatises or in literary works—a number of thinkers begin to subject it to close scrutiny to find adequate means of describing and managing it. Out of the matrix of war there develops a worldly thought that looks squarely at the empirical world and tries to take stock of the chicanes and hazards that organize it. In this investigation literature occupies a peculiar position at once inside and outside the discourse on war. On the one hand, literature as a medium plays a privileged role because it conjures a dynamic empirical field. With its concrete settings and multiple intersecting causal chains, the literary text can build the kind of three-dimensional world in which the new epistemic order

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can be made to appear. The works examined here seek to develop this potential maximally through a series of aesthetic choices. Central to this poetics is the notion of immersion. A textual form that props the door wide open so the reader might easily walk into the fictional universe and become implicated in the affairs becomes a condition for the depiction of the state of war. On the other hand, however, as a matter of design rather than genre the poetics of war cuts across traditional distinctions. As a symbolic mode that fuses a topical perspective with a temporal component, it can be employed in both a fictional and a historiographical text as well as on a military croquis or an autobiographic sketch. When Clausewitz suggests that fictive examples work just as well as historical ones and when he interrupts his analytical dissection of war and shifts to a different modality to convey the notions of danger and friction, it is because these elements of war can be made to appear only through carefully crafted simulations. As a media technology, literature, and the novel in particular, is thus eminently suited to make readers unlost in philosophical dreams. In this sense literature forms an integral part of the discourse on war, as when Dragomirov says of Tolstoy that his fictional narratives would be a most useful addition to a theoretical course on the art of war. And this consonance is reinforced at another level, for when Kleist speaks of literature as a throw of the dice, when Balzac and Stendhal describe the art of writing as analogous to the art of war, they extend the empire of the new epistemic regime to include the productive mode of one of the media in which it manifests itself. Itself subjected to the condition it depicts, writing, so is the claim at least, develops haphazardly from the random impulses that reveal themselves as it moves along. Yet within the military discourse literature also occupies the position of the outsider. It is itself a prism in which the military discourse is broken into different rays by way of a metareflection on its claims and suppositions. In the world of the novel the contingent elements that the simulations on the field and on the map sought to domesticate become a ubiquitous and overpowering force that thwarts any attempt to manage it. Here the inclusion of the element of chance into the order of things that began around 1800 reaches its non plus ultra when it is pushed beyond the limits of human comprehension. As a counterdiscourse literature performs a critique of the knowledge order inherent in the primary symbol of military management: the map. But the critique of the immaculate perception of cartography is emblematic of a more fundamental shift within the epistemic regime of modernity, for the appearance of the human being within representation that Foucault detects around

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1800 in other fields also comes to shape the discourse on war. The development of subjective probabilities; of habits, tact, routines; of the modus operandi that establishes a nexus between thinking and doing; of a space for the reader in textual simulations of war; of an autobiographic that transforms cartography into local topical mappings—all these developments take the immersed subject as its point of departure. It is for this malleable subject, continually conditioned by shifting circumstances, that the state of war is revealed. If we therefore look at the media and the poetics of military thought rather than at political economy, natural history, and general grammar, we find a more radical transformation of the order of things that installs not simply history but chance as its organizing principle. Articulated in treatises on the art of war, on sketches, in games, and in texts this knowledge order emerges as a response to war. As such, confined to the military discourse, it forms only a minor strand in the larger intellectual landscape of the time. And yet the ideas formulated by the military thinkers have a greater resonance, for the knowledge order outlined within the war matrix gradually comes to be regarded as a general condition of modernity. When, a few years after Tolstoy published the last installment of War and Peace, Nietzsche famously compares truth to a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms, war has become a signature for an epistemic regime that far exceeds the confines of the military. Nietzsche’s “Reich der Zufälle,” his empire of chance, designates the general makeup of the world as such.1 If, as Ian Hacking suggests, during the nineteenth century chance is gradually installed as the world’s basic operating principle in the sciences, the clearest formulation of related ideas within philosophy proper can be found in the pragmatist thought of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Concerned with the link between thought and action, the basic principles of the philosophical program are succinctly described by James when he, with his usual verve, summarizes the character of a pragmatist: “He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant, and the rationalist temper given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality and the pretense of finality in truth.”2 Instead of pursuing philosophies in two dimensions that are mere “outlines of buildings invented flat on paper,”3 he urges a philo-

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sophical course that steers directly out into the complexity and hazards of the multidimensional empirical world. Otherwise “it is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things.”4 Fallibilism is a central component in the pragmatist view of knowledge. For Dewey a quest for certainty based on Euclidean geometry has wrong-footed philosophy for millennia and is symptomatic of the refusal to face the “perils of uncertainty” that form the condition of all knowledge and action. Instead of favoring invariance, philosophy needs to turn outward to the realm of change, and, he continues, “change is always contingent; it has in it an element of chance that cannot be eliminated.” To this realm corresponds a kind of knowledge that is not a science but is empirical and particular, “a matter of probability, not of certainty.”5 Accordingly the standard of judgment is transferred from antecedents to consequents, from principles to effects. To act in this world therefore means to respond to the exigencies of concrete circumstances. While Peirce was the first among the pragmatists to speak of habits as the crucial third element that connects mind and world, and James became the most prominent champion of pragmatist philosophy, Dewey is perhaps the one who articulates a worldview that most closely resembles the one outlined in the discourse on war. Over against an idealist philosophy whose emblematic figure is Kant,6 Dewey, like the main thinkers of the present work, examines the conditions of a subject immersed in a world with all its flux and vicissitudes. The philosophical transition Dewey charts is that of the disembodied spectator’s view of knowledge to “knowing as an active participant in the drama of an on-moving world.”7 One does not need James’s military metaphor to see the correspondences between the basic tenets of the pragmatist program and those developed by the military thinkers.8 What was scattered across novels, treatises, pedagogical writings, and military sketches is here formulated as a cohesive philosophy that purports to describe not the state of war but the state of the world as such. Pragmatism may, it has been suggested, be a distinctly American tradition,9 but it summarizes, generalizes, and develops further a knowledge order that had been articulated across various fields within the European discourse on war. Already around 1800, however, there are indications that the state of war reveals a more general state of affairs. For writers such as Rühle von Lilienstern, Krug, Kleist, and Clausewitz the state of war and the state of peace cannot

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be distinguished absolutely. Rather they lie on a continuum where war, at one end, is simply the most intense articulation of an order that also organizes civil society at the other end. This is the lesson Balzac’s Colonel Chabert learns. When he returns from the Napoleonic Wars, saved by chance from underneath a pile of dead bodies on the frozen battlefield of Eylau in 1807, the state of war travels with him. To manage civil society one must “survey the terrain” and “make battle plans.” But thinking that the war has ended and unable to adapt to the more oblique forms of war that organize civil relations, the colonel is buried “underneath the living, underneath legal documents, underneath facts, underneath society as such.”10 For these thinkers war is a prism whose rays reflect back on society and reveal its latent order. The transferability of the state of war, the fact that it can serve as a cipher of modernity, might explain why a number of French thinkers in the twentieth century return to the period around 1800. In the 1970s and 1980s Michel de Certeau, Guy Debord, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, and others all look to writers such as Kleist and Clausewitz for models that can serve as analytical tools for an examination of society.11 While the military discourse plays no role in The Order of Things from 1966, ten years later, when Raymond Aron publishes his book on Clausewitz, Foucault attends to it in a series of lectures at the Collège de France. Their tentative premise is an inversion of Clausewitz’s dictum that war is a continuation of politics by other means. In Foucault’s lectures the state of war is transformed into an organizing metaphor, a schema, or an explanatory model. In his own words, “The elliptical and somber god of battles should enlighten the long days of order, work and peace.” The claim is that peace is merely an illusory surface phenomenon that rests on a more fundamental principle, “war with all its chance events.”12 Inherent in Foucault’s lecture series, in Debord’s invention of a war game, in Deleuze and Guattari’s Kleistian war machine from 1980, and in de Certeau’s notion of an “art of doing” from the same year, there is a view of society governed by the operative logic of war. In the metaphorical transfer from war to peace, it is not just the antagonistic structure that carries over but war as “a kind of permanent state.”13 To navigate such a world, to avoid the destiny of Colonel Chabert, it is necessary to adopt an advanced military modus operandi—thus the vocabulary of tactics and strategies in the theoretical texts of this period.14 What begins as an effort of the nineteenth century to make sense of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars is here transformed into an abstract figure that is subsequently implanted into a societal discourse

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as a structuring device. In this, its latest permutation, the state of war becomes a powerful figure for the general state of affairs. Like Borges’s tattered map, the empire of chance becomes a mappa mundi. The elective affinities between French theory and the military discourse around 1800 are variegated and require a detailed study of their own, a study that would effect an inversion of the method adopted here. If a number of these thinkers have informed my approach, the ideas and concepts developed by its main protagonists would in turn provide a framework for the discourse on war in modern French thought. This brief outline is intended merely to point to the later transformation of the state of war. For it is in the elaborate simulations of the war matrix in the nineteenth century, in the fictions, histories, and treatises, on maps and with dice, that the disorder of things is first articulated. And it is inside these simulations, immersed in their virtual worlds, that a modern world-oriented subject is formed: one who engages with the state of war and either learns to navigate it or succumbs to its hazards and chance events.

Notes

Introduction 1. Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege (Bonn: Dümmler, 1980), 253–54. All translations in the book are mine unless otherwise noted. 2. Ibid., 254. 3. Joseph de Maistre, Considérations sur la France (London, 1797), 39. 4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, L’État de guerre (Arles: Actes Sud, 2000), 24. For an argument against the immorality of philosophizing about war, see Christopher Coker, Barbarous Philosophers: Reflections on the Nature of War from Heraclitus to Heisenberg (London: Hurst, 2010). 5. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 196; John Locke, “Chapter III: Of the State of War,” in Two Treatises of Government (London: Awnsham Churchill, 1690), second treatise, 235–40. 6. Rousseau, L’État de guerre, 23–25. Rousseau’s reaction is emblematic of the larger discourse on war in the Enlightenment. As Madeleine Dobie writes, “The reframing of war as violence, suffering, and carnage is a defining move of Enlightenment social and political critique and indeed a discourse around which the idea of ‘enlightenment’ crystallized.” Madeleine Dobie, “The Enlightenment at War,” PMLA 124, no. 5 (2009): 1852. Thus Voltaire in Candide pits the human pain and suffering of war against a philosophical idea: Leibniz’s claim in Essais de Théodicée that the existing world is the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire, Candide ou l’optimisme (Paris:

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Gallimard, 2003), especially 33–34. From a juridicopolitical point of view the “state of exception” has recently received attention through Agamben’s reading of, among others, Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, while the human cost of war is the topic of Drew Faust’s book on the American Civil War. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suff ering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008). 7. Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001), 2: 761. 8. In a recent book Mary Favret has examined the deferred and more subtle impact of war on British Romanticism. As she cogently argues, the distant wars were integrated into the domestic setting of the authors’ everyday lives. Mary A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). For the writers considered here, however, the war experience spurred a reflection on war as an immediate and pervasive condition. 9. Michel Foucault, Il faut défendre la société: Cours au Collège de France, 1975– 1976 (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 1997), 154. 10. Georg Heinrich von Berenhorst, Betrachtungen über die Kriegskunst, über ihre Fortschritte, ihre Widersprüche und ihre Zuverlässigkeit (Osnabrück: Biblio Verlag 1978), 3: 437. 11. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 219. 12. Ibid., 308. Elsewhere he stresses the significance of the cause of the shift, but again he shies away from naming it: “It took a fundamental event—certainly one of the most radical that ever occurred in Western culture—to bring about the dissolution of the positivity of Classical knowledge, and to constitute another positivity from which, even now, we have doubtless not entirely emerged” (220). 13. A persuasive implementation of this more relaxed and flexible framework can be found in Daston and Galison’s treatment of overlapping models of objectivity. Lorraine Daston and Peter Gallison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007). 14. See the following by Joseph Vogl: Kalkül und Leidenschaft (Berlin: Diaphanes, 2007); “Für eine Poetologie des Wissens,” in Die Literatur und die Wissenschaften 1770– 1930 (Stuttgart: M & P, Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung, 1997); “Robuste und idiosynkratische Theorie,” KulturPoetik 7, no. 2 (2007). See also Jacques Rancière, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), and “La poétique du savoir,” La main de singe, nos. 11–12 (1994). 15. Rancière, The Names of History, 14. 16. Vogl, Kalkül und Leidenschaft, 13. 17. His first major statement of this idea is Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 18. Ibid., xli. For similar statements see Norbert Bolz, Am Ende der GutenbergGalaxis: Die neuen Kommunikations-verhältnisse (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1993), 130; Norbert Bolz, Theorie der neuen Medien (München: Raben Verlag, 1990), 82.

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19. As Kittler puts it, “Under the conditions of high technology, literature has nothing more to say” (Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 263). See also Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 369–72. A recent example of this tendency is Philipp von Hilgers’s otherwise excellent study of war games in which the literary text is treated merely as a historical document that chronicles the development of other media as well as its own obsolescence. See Philipp von Hilgers, Kriegsspiele: Eine Geschichte der Ausnahmezustände und Unberechenbarkeiten (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2008). For the strained relationship between literature and media studies see Niels Werber, “The Disappearance of Literature: Friedrich Kittler’s Path to Media Theory,” Thesis Eleven 107, no. 1 (2011): 47–52. 20. See Elisabeth Krimmer, The Representation of War in German Literature: From 1800 to the Present (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 5; Elisabeth Krimmer and Patricia Anne Simpson, eds., Enlightened War: German Theories and Cultures of Warfare from Frederick the Great to Clausewitz (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011), 4. Recently Martina Lüke has examined the nexus between war and German Romanticism primarily from a political perspective: Worte wie Waff en: Krieg und Romantik (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2013).

1. The Geometry of War 1. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 80–84. 2. For the early developments of fortification and their connection to science see Henry Guerlac, “Vauban: The Impact of Science on War,” in Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 64–90, especially 69–71. See also Christopher Duff y’s two major books on the history of fortification, Siege Warfare: The Fortress in the Early Modern World 1496–1660 (London: Routledge, 1979), and The Fortress in the Age of Vauban and Frederick the Great 1660–1789 (London: Routledge, 1985); Wolfgang Schäffner, “Diagramme der Macht,” in Cornelia Jöchner ed., Politische Räume: Stadt und Land in der Frühneuzeit (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003), 133–44; Christof Baier and Ulrich Reinisch, “Schußlinie, Sehstrahl und Augenlust: Zur Herrschaftskultur des Blickens in den Festungen und Gärten des 16. bis 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Horst Bredekamp and Pablo Schneider, eds., Visuelle Argumentationen: Die Mysterien der Repräsentation und die Berechenbarkeit der Welt (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006), 35–59. 3. Albrecht Dürer, Einiger Unterricht von der Befestigung der Städte, Schlösser und Flechen (Berlin: Carl Lehmann, 1823), 5. The capitalization and spelling of the title of this edition varies from the 1527 edition. 4. “Per la forma delle sue mura.” Niccolò Tartaglia, Quesiti et inventione diverse, quoted in Schäffner, “Diagramme der Macht,” 135. 5. Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, Nouveau traité de géométrie et fortification (Paris: Chez Sebastian Mabre Cramoisy, 1695), 16.

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6. The space of such treatises has the topography of a parade ground. Martin Warnke, “Raumgreifende Graphik,” Bildwelten des Wissens: Kunsthistorisches Jahrbuch for Bildkritik 1, no. 1 (2003): 80. 7. Vauban, Nouveau traité de géométrie et fortification, 46–47. 8. Ibid., 75. 9. See the statement by H. J.-B. Bousmard in Essais Général de Fortification et d’Attaque et Défense des Places, 2 vols. (Berlin: 1797–1799), 22–3, quoted in Duff y, The Fortress in the Age of Vauban, 82. 10. Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopædia, or, An universal dictionary of arts and sciences: containing the definitions of the terms, and accounts of the things signify’ d thereby, in the several arts, both liberal and mechanical, and the several sciences, human and divine: the figures, kinds, properties, productions, preparations, and uses, of things natural and artificial: the rise, progress, and state of things ecclesiastical, civil, military, and commercial: with the several systems, sects, opinions, &c: among philosophers, divines, mathematicians, physicians, antiquaries, criticks, &c: the whole intended as a course of antient and modern learning (London: printed for James and John Knapton, John Darby, Daniel Midwinter, Arthur Bettesworth, John Senex, Robert Gosling, John Pemberton, William and John Innys, John Oshorn and Tho. Longman, Charles Rivington, John Hooke, Ranew Robinson, Francis Clay, Aaron Ward, Edward Symon, Daniel Browne, Andrew Johnston, and Thomas Osborn, 1728), 1: 79. 11. See Victoria Sanger, “Vauban et la topographie des places fortes: Brest et Longwy,” in Catherine Bousquet-Bressolier, ed., Le paysage des cartes: Genèse d’une codification (Paris: Le Musée, 1999), 54. 12. Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, De l’attaque et de la defense des places (La Haye: Chez Pierre de Hondt, 1737), 1: 29. 13. Ibid. 14. Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, Traité de la défense des places (Amsterdam, 1771), 2: 32–33. See also David G. Chandler, “The Art and Science of Fortification and Siegecraft,” in The Age of William III and Mary II: Power, Politics, and Patronage, 1688–1702 (Williamsburg: College of William and Mary, 1989), 125. 15. Daniel Defoe, An Essay upon Projects (London: Printed by R. R. for Tho. Cockerill, 1697), 256–57. 16. Guerlac, “Vauban: The Impact of Science on War,” 67. For Joan DeJean, Vauban serves as the emblematic figure of Foucault’s Classical Age. Joan DeJean, Literary Fortifications: Rousseau, Laclos, Sade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 26. 17. Blaise Pascal, Opuscules et Lettres (Paris: Aubier, 1955), 121. 18. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 686. 19. Ibid., 688. 20. Ibid., 151. 21. Chambers, Cyclopædia, 1: 79. 22. Baier and Reinisch suggest that the proven mathematical basis of their work allowed engineers, architects, and artists to believe that they were participating in the construction of the order of the universe (“Schußlinie, Sehstrahl und Augenlust,” 45).

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23. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 74. 24. Ibid., 75. I have placed my own ellipses in brackets to distinguish them from those in the original text. 25. Nicolas Tindal, Th e History of England, by Mr. Rapin de Thoyras, 4 vols. (London, 1732–1745). This connection was first noted by Theodore Baird in “The TimeScheme of Tristram Shandy and a Source,” PMLA 51, no. 3 (1936): 803–20. In some editions the maps are published in a separate volume: Maps of European cities for Tindal’s continuation of Paul de Rapin’s History of England. 26. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 79. 27. Ibid., 80. 28. Ibid. 79. 29. Melvyn New, Richard A. Davies, and W. G. Day are surely correct say that it is superfluous to follow Toby and attempt to locate, as Ian Watt does, the precise spot of the encounter. Yet Toby’s use and abuse of media are not simply a cause of bewilderment as they suggest. They also provide some insight into the conception of war within the discourse on fortification. See Melvyn New, Richard A. Davies, and W. G. Day, eds., The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, vol. 3: The Notes (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1984), 127. 30. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 80. 31. Ibid., 400. 32. See Wolfgang Schäffner, “Operationale Topographie: Repräsentationsräume in den Niederlanden um 1600,” in Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Michael Hagner, and Bettina Wahrig-Schmidt, eds., Räume des Wissens: Repräsentation, Codierung, Spur (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997), 66. 33. Isabelle Warmoes, Le musée des Plans-Reliefs: Maquettes historiques de villes fortifiées (Paris: Éditions du patrimoine, 1997), 7; Antoine Roux, Nicolas Faucherre, and Guillaume Monsaingeon, Les plans en relief des places du roy (Paris: Éditions Adam Biro, 1989), 154. Several of the models have been destroyed, but a number of them are on display in the Musée des Plans-reliefs in Paris. 34. Warmoes, Le musée des Plans-Reliefs, 36–37. 35. The choice of the bowling green as the site of the fortification may reflect the flourishing of the garden labyrinth in England between 1650 and 1740. The fusion of this pastoral architecture and the military architecture might explain not only the size of the model but also Toby’s position inside it. See Stephen Soud, “ ‘Weavers, Gardeners, and Gladiators’: Labyrinths in Tristram Shandy,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 28, no. 4 (1995): 397–411. 36. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 400–401. 37. Ibid., 86–87. 38. Ibid., 401, 404. 39. David McNeil’s claim that Toby’s model is merely a “ludicrous game” misses the point. We should, as Richard Lanham suggests, take the war game seriously. Reading it within the larger framework of Huizinga’s Homo Ludens and game theory from the 1960s, however, Lanham does not address the nature of the model as

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model and its reflection on the discourse on war around 1700—the line of inquiry followed here. David McNeil, The Grotesque Depiction of War and the Military in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), 150; Richard A. Lanham, Tristram Shandy: The Games of Pleasure (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). 40. While Michael Rotenberg-Schwartz describes Sterne’s stance toward war in his sermons as ambivalent but predominantly negative, Madeleine Descargues argues that ultimately the issue remains unresolved. Michael Rotenberg-Schwartz, “Sterne and the Art of War Sermons,” in W. B. Gerard, ed., Divine Rhetoric: Essays on the Sermons of Laurence Sterne (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010), 229–49; Madeleine Descargues, “Tristram Shandy and the Appositeness of War,” in Thomas Keymer, ed., Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: A Casebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 240–58. In a similar vein Sterne’s staging of Toby’s adventures on the bowling green is generally regarded as an ambivalent critique of war and specifically of the British involvement in the Seven Years’ War. See Ann Campbell, “Tristram Shandy and the Seven Years’ War: Beyond the Borders of the Bowling Green,” Shandean: An Annual Devoted to Laurence Sterne and His Works 17 (Nov. 2006): 106–20; Tom Keymer, “Horticulture Wars: Tristram Shandy and Upon Appleton House,” Shandean: An Annual Devoted to Laurence Sterne and His Works 11 (1999–2000): 38–46; Madeleine Dobie, “The Enlightenment at War,” PMLA 124, no. 5 (2009): 1851–54. 41. Friedrich Kittler’s early book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter set the tone for this line of inquiry. As Geoffrey-Winthrop Young points out in the introduction to the English edition, “Readers of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter and Kittler’s related essays might be left with the impression that in spite of all distancing maneuvers, Kittler seems to feel a certain reverence, if not for the writers themselves, then certainly for their largely unquestioning admiration of (media-)technological innovations.” Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), xxxviii. See also Geoffrey WinthropYoung, “Drill and Distraction in the Yellow Submarine: On the Dominance of War in Friedrich Kittler’s Media Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28 (Summer 2002): 825–54. 42. As David Wellbery points out, the interruption is a central figure in such a poetics. “Der Zufall der Geburt: Sterne’s Poetik der Kontingenz,” in Gerhart von Graevenitz and Odo Marquard, eds., Kontingenz (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1998), 291–317. For this concept see also Wolfgang Iser, Laurence Sterne Tristram Shandy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 60–71; Jesse Molesworth, Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Realism, Probability, Magic (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 189–204. 43. “Verisimilitude [ . . . ] is not always on the Side of Truth.” Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 262. 44. Rainer Warning claims that Sterne breaks with the tradition in Defoe and Fielding of identifying the narrator with the historiographer by repeatedly undermining all attempts at grounding the narrative in fact. This is confirmed indirectly by Walter’s statement, which seeks to ground fact on the improbable. Rainer Warning, “Fiktion

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und Wirklichkeit in Sternes ‘Tristram Shandy’ und Diderots ‘Jacques le fataliste,’ ” in Hans Robert Jauß, ed., Nachahmung und Illusion (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1969), 100. 45. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 33, 12. 46. Ibid., 33–34. 47. Ibid., 34. 48. If it is indeed the same map. It is not certain that the initial promise, which would have placed the map at the end of the last volume, is ever kept. As the inscription indicates, this map appears to issue from the study of Tristram Shandy rather than from the engraver’s shop. 49. Wolfgang Iser discusses the “typographical patterns” in Tristram Shandy against the background of the biographical form of the eighteenth-century novel. The more immediate foil seems to be the graphics of the science of fortification, but the convergence on the map of military and narrative architecture and Sterne’s subsequent disquisition on the polyvalence of the line suggest that he is operating at several levels and against several backgrounds at once (Laurence Sterne Tristram Shandy, 72–73). 50. Neither Sterne nor Tristram therefore succeed in fi nding an Archimedean point that provides a (cartographic) overview of Tristram’s life. Instead the map displays only the unmanageable space of narration. See Matthias Buschmeier, “Ordnungen der ungesicherten Welt: Archiv und Karte in der Metaphorologie des Wissens bei Sterne und Goethe,” in Topographien der Literatur: Deutsche Literatur im transnationalen Kontext (Stuttgart: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 2005), 138–39. The disjunctive link between military cartography and narration is also a salient feature of the frontispiece that Sterne commissioned from William Hogarth for the second edition of the book. The engraving depicts Trim reading the sermon that has fallen out of Toby’s copy of Stevinus. On the wall in the background hangs a map of a fortification, which we, with W. B. Gerard, may assume is Toby’s map of Namur even though the fortification in the engraving appears to be more regular than the one at Namur. Such regularity, however, is contrasted by the series of random events that brought the “ill-fated sermon” into the treatise of fortification and that continues to haunt the sermon in an improbable crescendo of chance happenings. See Sterne, Tristram Shandy 108–27. For a detailed analysis of Hogarth’s engraving see W. B. Gerard, Laurence Sterne and the Visual Imagination (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 53–66. 51. Sterne, The Sermons of Laurence Sterne, quoted in Ian Campbell Ross, Laurence Sterne: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 238. 52. There are indeed occasional somber overtones to the celebration of contingency, but to claim, as Jesse Molesworth does in an otherwise eminently readable and enlightening book, that Tristram Shandy is governed by the “extensive project of denouncing accident” is somewhat of an overstatement, and it disregards the narrative potential of chance, which Sterne exploits in full measure. See Molesworth, Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 204. 53. After the turn of the century Napoleon would write, “Without a doubt they cannot stop an army by themselves; but they are an excellent means for slowing down, hindering, weakening, and threatening a victorious enemy.” Napoléon, Maximes de

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guerre de Napoléon (Adamant Media Corporation, 2006), 23–4. This is a facsimile of the edition published in 1837 by the Société Belge de Librairie in Brussels. 54. The phrase is Guerlac’s (“Vauban: The Impact of Science on War,” 73). 55. Moreover the restrained wars of the eighteenth century served as a “theater of the aristocracy,” as David A. Bell points out, that is, as part of a culture of honor in which values where put on display. This would come to an end with the Napoleonic Wars. David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 5, 34–37. 56. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 46–50. 57. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 511–12. In spite of Toby’s awareness of the importance of geography, his obsession with sieges means that none of the major battles in the Wars of the Spanish Succession that took place in the open terrain are mentioned. See Fritz Gysin, Model as Motif in Tristram Shandy (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1983), 100. 58. In his poem “L’Art de la Guerre” from 1751, Frederick conjures the ghost of Vauban to show the military novices “par quels sciences et par quels artifices / Vous avez assuré les places des Français / Contre les bras germains et les canons anglais.” At the beginning of the Seven Years’ War he composed a series of aphorisms on the basic principles of fortification in which he claims that the construction of the fortification should seek to gain as much advantage from the terrain as possible. Fifty years later, when the nature of war had changed significantly, Napoleon would still meet on a weekly basis with his Committee on Fortifications. See Duff y, The Fortress in the Age of Vauban, 139; Philippe Prost, “Les places fortes terrestres,” in Philippe Prost, ed., Architectures Militaires Napoléoniennes (Paris: Ministère de la culture et de la francophonie, Direction du patrimoine, Musée des plans-reliefs, 1994), 30. 59. Isabelle Warmoes explains that the gallery of plans-reliefs was eventually attached to the Ser vice géographique de l’armée, whose main concern was with cartography. Also at the institutional level, then, models became subservient to map production. Henry Guerlac also notes that toward the end of his life Vauban appears to lay more emphasis on the army and less on fortification. Warmoes, Le musée des Plans-Reliefs, 15; Guerlac, “Vauban: The Impact of Science on War,” 90. 60. Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege (Bonn: Dümmler, 1980), 403. 61. For a detailed bibliography of these works that ends just before the publication by Montbrison in 1818 see René Bosch, Labyrinth of Digressions: Tristram Shandy as Perceived and Influenced by Sterne’s Early Imitators (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 281– 93. For the implications of Tristram Shandy’s publication history, in particular its serialization, see Thomas Keymer, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 62. See Arthur Chuquet, La jeunesse de Napoléon (Paris: A. Colin, 1897), 1: 181, 429. 63. Louis-Simon-Joseph Bernard de Montbrison, Jeu de la guerre de terre et de mer, et les derniers chapitres de Tristram Shandy, trouvés dans les papiers d’Yorick avec figures (Paris, 1818), iv. 64. Ibid.

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65. Ibid., 2. 66. Ibid., 4. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., 30. 69. Ibid., 35. 70. Joseph, vicomte de Rogniat, Considérations sur l’art de la guerre (Paris: Magimel, Anselin, et Pochard, 1817), 252. 71. Montbrison, Jeu de la guerre, 35. 72. Ibid., 41. 73. Ibid., 27.

2. State of War 1800 1. Carl von Clausewitz, Hinterlassene Werke (Berlin: Dümmler, 1862), 7: 27–28. 2. Georg Heinrich von Berenhorst, Betrachtungen über die Kriegskunst, über ihre Fortschritte, ihre Widersprüche und ihre Zuverlässigkeit (Osnabrück: Biblio Verlag, 1978), 1: xvii. For its impact in intellectual circles see also an anonymous review of Carl von Decker’s and Joseph, vicomte de Rogniat’s book, Ansichten über die Kriegführung im Geiste der Zeit, published in Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, no. 218 (Sept. 1818): 41–47. 3. Georg Heinrich von Berenhorst, Aus dem Nachlaße (Osnabrück: Biblio Verlag, 1978), 16. 4. Berenhorst, Betrachtungen, 1: 33. 5. Letter to Rühle von Lilienstern, August 28, 1808, in Berenhorst, Aus dem Nachlaße, 287. 6. Marquis de Puysegur, quoted in Martin van Creveld, The Art of War: War and Military Thought (London: Cassel, 2000), 81–82. Puysegur’s contemporary, Lancelot Turpin de Crissé, displays a greater awareness of the difficulties involved in carrying out universal rules of military theory in practice, but in his Essai sur l’art de la guerre from 1754 he nevertheless proposes a direct application of Vauban’s siege methods to field warfare. See Azar Gat, The Origins of Military Thought from the Enlightenment to Clausewitz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 37. 7. Puysegur quoted in Creveld, The Art of War, 81. 8. See Jeremy Black, European Warfare 1660–1815 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 64. See also Jeremy Black, Introduction to Global Military History: 1775 to the Present Day (London: Routledge, 2005), 18–19; Simon Schaffer, “Enlightened Automata,” in William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer, eds., The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 126–69. 9. Berenhorst, Betrachtungen, 2: 216–17. 10. Ibid., 2: 333–34. 11. Herfried Münkler, Der Wandel des Krieges: Von der Symmetrie zur Asymmetrie (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2006), 52–56. See also Stéphane Béraud, La révolution militaire napoléonienne, vol. 1: Les manoeuvres (Paris: Bernard Giovanangeli Éditeur, 2007), 323–24.

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12. George Frédéric de Martens, Receuil des principaux traités Depuis 1761 jusqu’ à présent, vol. 6: Supplémens et continuation jusqu’aux préliminaires de Leoben 1797 (Göttingen: Chés Jean Chretien Dieterich, 1800), 749. See also Stefan Kaufmann, Kommunikationstechnik und Kriegführung 1815–1945: Stufen telemedialer Rüstung (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1996), 45. 13. Martin van Creveld, Command in War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 60. 14. Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege (Bonn: Dümmler, 1980), 534. 15. Creveld, Command in War, 14. Creveld also claims that this revolution owed little to technological advances. As we shall see in Chapter 5, however, cartography came to play a major role in the management of military space around 1800. 16. Creveld, Command in War, 60–71. 17. Kaufmann, Kommunikationstechnik und Kriegführung, 61. See also Walter Görlitz, Kleine Geschichte des Deutschen Generalstabes (Berlin: Haude und Spenersche Verlagsbuchhandlung 1967), 15–6; R.  R. Palmer, “Frederick the Great, Guibert, Bülow: From Dynastic to National War,” in Paret, Makers of Modern Strategy, 94. 18. The other nations were slow to adopt the new system, and until 1806 the Prussian Army carried eight to ten times as much baggage as the French. By 1813, however, the Prussian armies were as mobile as their French counterparts. See Gunther E. Rothenberg, The Art of Warfare in the Age of Napoleon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 82. 19. Honoré de Balzac, Maximes et Pensées de Napoléon: Choisies et présentées par Honoré de Balzac (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 1999), 35. 20. Carl von Clausewitz, “Strategie aus dem Jahr 1804 mit Zusätzen von 1808 und 1809,” in Verstreute kleine Schriften (Osnabrück: Biblio Verlag, 1979), 36. 21. See Kaufmann, Kommunikationstechnik und Kriegführung, 26. 22. The greater independence was predicated on a change in the soldiers’ emotional attachment. In the age of mercenary armies, when desertions where frequent, Friedrich II famously stated that the soldier should fear his commanding officer more than the enemy. With the nationalization of the army around 1800, warfare became an ethic, the conscientious behavior of the bon citoyen. See Michel Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population: Cours au Collège de France. 1977–1978 (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 2004), 201; Palmer, “Frederick the Great, Guibert, Bülow,” 99. 23. Rothenberg, The Art of War in the Age of Napoleon, 65–67. 24. The radical break with the traditional methods of warfare and the difficulties of developing a new vocabulary to comprehend it are clearly articulated by Clausewitz when he tries to take stock of the situation: “The old kind of warfare has crumbled in the Revolutionary Wars; since the times and the political structures had changed, its forms and means were no longer apt; this was commonly felt and was forced upon all by the French sword. That opinion went even further, that the belief in the old system had been even more undermined than the system itself is not news to anyone. With their revolutionary methods, the French had attacked the old instrument of war as if they had thrown nitric acid on it; they had unshackled the

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terrible element of war from its diplomatic and financial fetters: now it marched forth in its raw violence rolling a monstrous mass of forces along with it, and you saw nothing but the ruins of the old art of war on the one side and unheard-of successes on the other, without being able to discern clearly a new system of waging war, i.e. new paths of intelligence, new positive forms in the use of forces. War had been returned to the people from whom it had in part been taken by the standing armies; it had shaken off the fetters, it had transgressed the imagined impossibilities.—Th is was all that anyone understood of it; what structure was to be built on this larger and stronger basis would only be developed gradually.” Clausewitz, “Über das Leben und den Charakter von Scharnhorst 1817,” in Verstreute, 228–29. Given the vast expansion of the scope of war and the abandonment of previous restraints, David A. Bell labels the Napoleonic Wars the first total war. See The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007). 25. Clausewitz, “Über das Leben und den Charakter von Scharnhorst 1817,” in Verstreute, 229; Antoine-Henri Jomini, Traité des grandes opérations militaires (Paris: Chez Magimel, Libraire pour l’art militaire, 1811–1816). Current historiography includes an additional operational level. To explain the Napoleonic military revolution, Béraud identifies an intermediary level of military operations between strategy and tactics, namely “operational strategy, also called grand tactics or operational tactics, which corresponds to the movements of large military units that are combined for a military objective on a given theater of operations” (La révolution militaire napoléonienne, 6). 26. See “Terrain,” in Le grand Robert de la langue français (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 2001). 27. See “Terrain,” in Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschaff ten und Künste, vol. 42 (Halle, 1744). 28. See, for example, Ludwig Freidrich Erck, Anleitung zum zweckmässigen Studium der Kriegswissenschaft: Von einem norddeutschen Officiere (Leipzig: Hahn, 1828); Otto August Rühle von Lilienstern, Aufsätze über Gegenstände und Ereignisse aus dem Gebiete des Kriegswesens (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler, 1818); Otto August Rühle von Lilienstern, Handbuch für den Offizier zur Belehrung im Frieden und zum Gebrauch im Felde (Berlin: Reimer, 1817); Wilhelm Traugott Krug, System der Kriegswissenschaften und ihrer Literatur (Leipzig: bei Wilhelm Rein, 1815); Georg Venturini, Lehrbuch der Militair-Geographie der östlichen Länder am Niederrhein In Vier Bänden (Koppenhagen: bei Schubothe, 1801); Johann Georg Lehmann, Die Lehre der Situations-Zeichnung (Dresden: in der Arnoldischen Buch- und Kunsthandlung, 1816); Ernst Heinrich Michaelis, Einige durch die Fortsetzung der Bohnenberger-Ammonschen Karte von Schwaben veranlaßte Bemerkungen über die topographische Kunst (Bern, 1825), 676. In Russia, P. A. Iazykov would later emphasize the strategic importance of military geography in his Opyt’ teorii voennoi geografii. See Olaf Rose, Carl von Clausewitz: Wirkungsgeschichte seines Werkes in Rußland und der Sowjetunion 1836–1991 (München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1995), 39. See also David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, “Reforming Military Intelligence,” in David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye and Bruce W. Menning, eds., Reforming the Tsar’s Army: Military Innovation in

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Imperial Russia from Peter the Great to the Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 140–41. 29. Rühle, Handbuch, 4. 30. Ibid., 5. Later they are also called the “finesses du terrain.” See Jean Maximilien Lamarque and François Nicolas Fririon, eds., Le Spectateur militaire: Recueil de science, d’art et d’ histoire militaires (Paris: Bureau du Spectateur militaire, 1828), 4: 334. 31. Rühle, Handbuch, 77. 32. Ibid., 76. 33. Ibid., 221. 34. In like manner Georg Venturini defines the art of war as “the science of ordering troops according to the advantages of the terrain in order to prevent an unfavorable combat in every military situation.” Mathematisches System der angewandten Taktik oder eigentlichen Kriegswissenschaft (Schleswig: J. G. Röhß, 1800), 11. 35. Rühle, Handbuch, 76. 36. Ibid., 75–76. 37. Ibid., 75. 38. See, for example, Clausewitz’s chapter “Gegend und Boden” in book 5 of Vom Kriege. 39. See Chenxi Tang, “Poetologie der Kulturlandschaft bei Alexander von Humboldt und Friedrich Hölderlin,” in Inka Mülder-Bach and Gerhard Neumann, eds., Räume der Romantik (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), 178. 40. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 450. 41. Erck, Anleitung, iv. For a similar French view of the caesura marked by the Napoleonic Wars with respect to the impact of the terrain, see Mémorial topographique et militaire, vol. 4: Historique (Paris: de l’imprimerie de la république, 1803), xlii–xliii. 42. Erck, Anleitung, 31. 43. Ibid., 47–48. See also 6. 44. Venturini, Lehrbuch der Strategie, 7. Likewise in 1803 the main governmental publication on topography in France, the Mémorial topographique et militaire, stated, “Perhaps because our armies are larger and further extended and because our firearms have greater effect and further range [ . . . ] we have a greater interest in knowing the terrain well when we occupy it, for on a greater surface it presents more useful or dangerous accidents” (4: vi). 45. Rühle, Handbuch, 5. 46. Ibid., 74–75. 47. Clausewitz, “Über das Leben und den Charakter von Scharnhorst 1817,” in Verstreute, 228. 48. Carl von Clausewitz, Politische Schriften und Briefe, ed. Hans Rothfels (München: Drei Masken Verlag, 1922), 68, emphasis added. 49. Berenhorst, Betrachtungen, 3: 561–62. 50. As Frederick Beiser makes clear, the absolute ego for Fichte is conceived as a goal we cannot ultimately achieve, but even so it is the primary role granted the subject that Berenhorst objects to. See Frederick Beiser, “Introduction: Hegel and the

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Problem of Metaphysics,” in Frederick Beiser, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 13–4. 51. Clausewitz, Politische Schriften und Briefe, 65. 52. According to Clausewitz himself, the successful military commander is characterized not by a great power of meditation but by a certain “direction of the mind”— he must be empirically minded (Vom Kriege, 236). Panajotis Kondylis correctly points to the changed starting point of the philosophy of war when he writes, “Clausewitz as a methodologist in no way continued the thought of classical German philosophy and simply modified it for his own epistemic purposes.” Instead, like the ideal commander, Clausewitz’s theoretical work grows out of an analysis of the empirical. Theorie des Krieges: Clausewitz—Marx—Engels—Lenin (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1988), 99. 53. Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (Leipzig: Krabbe-Lassota, 1883), 17: 221. See also Krug, System der Kriegswissenschaften, vi–vii. 54. Krug, System der Kriegswissenschaften, 17, 82. 55. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 184. 56. The works of Heinrich Dietrich Freiherr von Bülow are exemplary for the persistence of the geometrical paradigm. See, for example, Geist des neuern Kriegssystems (Hamburg: bei Benjamin Gottlieb Hoffman, 1799); Lehrsätze des neuern Krieges (Berlin: bei Heinrich Frölich, 1805). As Beatrice Heuser notes, the question whether warfare is an art or a science becomes a topic of heated debate around 1800. Beatrice Heuser, Den Krieg Denken: Die Entwicklung der Strategie seit der Antike (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2010), 21–23. 57. Berenhorst, Betrachtungen, 3: 437. 58. Ibid., 2: 334, 132. 59. Nor can it be replicated. In a thought experiment Berenhorst imagines a scenario in which one hundred battles are played out between similar commanders in similar circumstances. In such a repetition of the same, events would quickly take entirely divergent paths because a minute change would affect the course of the entire battle. Ibid., 3: 545. 60. Ibid., 1: 100. Berenhorst refers to the Battle of Torgau on November 3, 1760. Under the command of Frederick II the Prussian Army won a hard-fought victory over the Austrian army led by Field Marshall Leopold Joseph von Daun. By late afternoon the larger Austrian army seemed to carry the day, but when dusk fell the Prussians launched a final, successful attack. 61. Frederick II, Friedrich der Grosse: Werke in 12 Bänden, vol. 6: Potsdamer Ausgabe (Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2007), 232. 62. See Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik gechichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), 162. 63. Ibid., 165. 64. According to Berenhorst’s biographer, Archenholz deeply regretted writing his famous work on the Seven Years’ War after he read Berenhorst’s Reflections. See v. Meerheimb., “Behrenhorst, Georg Heinrich von,” in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1875), 2: 287–89.

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65. In Torquato Tasso’s description of the Crusades, for example, Fortune only appears to wield her arbitrary power; in the end she is revealed to be the handmaiden of divine providence. The Liberation of Jerusalem, trans. Max Wickert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 392. 66. Berenhorst, Betrachtungen, 1: 105. 67. Napoleon, in spite of his skill as a commander, would later state, “There are only two kinds of strategies, the good and the bad; the good almost always fail due to unforeseen circumstances that make the bad succeed” (quoted in Balzac, Maximes et Pensées de Napoléon, 41). 68. Berenhorst, Betrachtungen, 1: 80. 69. Ibid., 1: 105. 70. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1988), 9–10. 71. Ibid., 10. 72. The renowned statement appears in a letter to the theologian Niethammer on October 13, 1806. G. W. F. Hegel, Briefe von und an Hegel, Band 1: 1785–1812, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1952), 120. 73. Hegel, Phänomenologie, 60. 74. Ibid., 8. 75. Ibid., 530, 386. 76. Aron and Böhme also dispute any intellectual connection between Hegel and Clausewitz. The attempt by Andreas Herberg-Rothe to link Hegel and Clausewitz based on a structural similarity between Hegel’s triadic division of power in society and Clausewitz’s trinity of war more than anything displays the very distant relation between the two. Connections should rather be found in their political views of the state and in the dialectical method of reasoning, as convincingly argued by Peter Paret and Azar Gat. See Raymond Aron, Penser la guerre, Clausewitz, vol. 1: L’ âge européen (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1976), 360–68; Hartmut Böhme, “Krieg und Zufall: Die Transformation der Kriegskunst bei Carl von Clausewitz,” in Marco Formisano and Hartmut Böhme, eds., War in Words: Transformations of War from Antiquity to Clausewitz (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), 391–415; Andreas Herberg-Rothe, “Clausewitz und Hegel,” in Forschungen zur Brandenburgischen und Preussischen Geschichte, 10, Band, Heft 1 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2000), 49–85; Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State: The Man, His Theories, and His Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Gat, The Origins of Military Thought, 234. In recent years new interpretations have contested the metaphysical reading of Hegel, in par ticu lar of the Phenomenology. See, for example, Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008). But even a nonmetaphysical view of the early Hegel does little to bridge the gap between his speculative constructs and the empirically minded military thinkers.

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77. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986). The philosophy of history is now regarded as a “theodicy, a vindication of God” (28). 78. Ibid., 9. 79. Ibid., 46. 80. Ibid., 49. 81. Ibid., 75. 82. Hegel, Phänomenologie, 314. 83. We should therefore not take Hegel’s equation of war and the spirit at face value. Only in a limited sense is it true that for Hegel “the modern is born out of powder and lead, military and media technology,” as Niels Werber claims in Die Geopolitik der Literatur: Eine Vermessung der medialen Weltraumordnung (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2007), 78. For Hegel the battle itself is merely an epiphenomenon, an effect orchestrated by the spirit. 84. Hegel, Vorlesungen, 52–53. 85. In the lecture notes by his students compiled under the title Die Vernunft in der Geschichte (Reason in History), Hegel regards the exclusion of chance as the fundamental purpose of philosophical inquiry: “Philosophical reflection has no purpose other than to remove the accidental.” Quoted in Sascha Michel, Ordnungen der Kontingenz: Figurationen der Unterbrechung in Erzähldiskursen um 1800 (Wieland—Jean Paul—Brentano) (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006), 12. See also Dieter Henrich, “Hegel’s Theorie über den Zufall,” in Hegel im Kontext (Frankfurt am Mein: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1987), 157–87; Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft, 174. 86. Hegel, Vorlesungen, 53. 87. See, for example, ibid., 22, 25, 81, 97. 88. Clausewitz’s departure from a theory that operates with pure concepts and his attempt to think war as the middle ground are also manifest in his final claim that warfare is conditioned by and subsumed in the political process. See Aron, Penser la guerre, Clausewitz, especially 1: 10–11, 82, 107. 89. The modern era of Clausewitz studies that was inaugurated in 1976 with Raymond Aron’s Penser la guerre, Peter Paret’s excellent study of Clausewitz and the Prussian state, and Foucault’s commentaries in his lecture series at the Collège de France has focused on the political aspects of Clausewitz’s work and mainly on Vom Kriege. War as an epistemic regime and the question of probability have therefore been treated only en passant. Brief commentaries can be found in Géza Perjés, “Militärgeschichte und Militärpsychologie,” in Ursula von Gersdorff, ed., Geschichte und Militärgeschichte: Wege der Forschung (Frankfurt am Main: Bernard & Graefe Verlag für Wehrwesen, 1974), 201–11; Hans-Christian von Hermann, “Bewegliche Heere: Zur Kalkulation des Irregulären bei Kleist und Clausewitz,” in Kleist-Jahrbuch, 1998, 227–43; Aron, Penser la guerre, Clausewitz, 1: 294–300. After a first draft of this chapter had been written, however, two fi ne articles appeared that also examine Clausewitz’s epistemology: Böhme, “Krieg und Zufall,” 391–415; Arndt Niebisch, “Military Intelligence: On Carl von Clausewitz’s Hermeneutics of Disturbance and

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Probability,” in Elisabeth Krimmer and Patricia Anne Simpson, eds., Enlightened War: German Theories and Cultures of Warfare from Frederick the Great to Clausewitz (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011), 258–78. 90. To eke out an existence Kant himself in his early years supplied his meager income with a lecture series on fortification to the Russian soldiers occupying Königsberg in the late 1750s. He applied his knowledge of geometry to the subject, and among the works on which he based his lectures was Leonhard Christoph Sturm’s Le véritable Vauban from 1710. See J. H. W. Stuckenberg, The Life of Immanuel Kant (London: Macmillan, 1882), 68; Gottfried Martin, Arithmetik und Kombinatorik bei Kant (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1972), 14–16. 91. Clausewitz, “Strategie aus dem Jahr 1804,” in Verstreute, 6. 92. Clausewitz, “Bemerkungen über die reine und angewandte Strategie des Herrn von Bülow oder Kritik der darin enthaltenen Ansichten,” in Verstreute, 73. See also Carl von Clausewitz, “Ueber die künftigen Kriegs-Operationen Preußens gegen Frankreich,” in Schriften—Aufsätze—Studien—Briefe, ed. Werner Hahlweg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966), vol. 1 and (1990), vol. 2, books 1 and 2, 80, where he directly contrasts probability to geometry. 93. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 199. 94. Ibid. 95. As Peter Paret writes, chance thereby ceases to be solely a danger. It also turns into a “positive force to be exploited” (Clausewitz and the State, 203). 96. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 306. 97. Ibid., 199. 98. Lorraine Daston, ed., Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), xi–xii and passim. See also Gerd Gigerenzer et al., The Empire of Chance: How Probability Changed Science and Everyday Life (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Lorenz Krüger et al., The Probabilistic Revolution (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1987). As Elena Esposito has noted, statistics, probabilities, and projections serve as “guides” into the future. In the epistemic regime of war as outlined by Clausewitz, probability theory takes on a similar role as a guide or rule of thumb. Elena Esposito, Die Fiktion der wahrscheinlichen Realität (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), 60. 99. Hegel, Phänomenologie, 171. 100. Aristotle, The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 47. For Aristotle’s theory of contingency see also Franz Josef Wetz, “Die Begriffe ‘Zufall’ und ‘Kontingenz,’ ” in Gerhart von Graevenitz and Odo Marquard, eds., Kontingenz (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1998), 27–35. 101. Boethius, Commentarii in librum Aristotelis Peri hermeneias (Lipsiae: In aedibus B. G. Teubneri, 1877–1880), 1: 21. 102. See James Q. Whitman, The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 103. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 233. 104. The phrase in German is “[das] Reich möglicher Ereignisse” (Schriften, 1: 78).

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105. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 200. 106. Ibid., 298. 107. Mémorial topographique et militaire, 4: xlvii. 108. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 251. 109. Ibid., 961. 110. Carl von Clausewitz, Karl und Maria v. Clausewitz: Ein Lebensbild in Briefen und Tagebuchblättern, ed. Karl Linnebach (Berlin: Verlag von Martin Warneck, 1925), 94. 111. Clausewitz, Schriften, 1: 78. See also Clausewitz, “Historische Briefe über die großen Kriegsereignisse 1806, 1807,” in Verstreute, 116: “because in war, everything depends not on the absolute degree of probability but on the relative degree of probability, and the smallest probability is always greater than none at all.” 112. Clausewitz, Schriften, 1: 78–79. 113. Pascal, Pensées (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2004), §233. 114. Clausewitz, Schriften, 1: 78–79. 115. For a recent analysis of this aspect of Clausewitz’s thought see Ulrike Kleemeier, “Moral Forces in War,” in Hew Strachan and Andreas Herberg-Rothe, eds., Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 107–22. 116. Clausewitz, “Historische Briefe über die großen Kriegsereignisse 1806, 1807,” in Verstreute, 116. 117. Ibid. 118. Clausewitz, Übersicht des Sr. Königl. Hoheit dem Kronprinzen in den Jahren 1810, 1811 und 1812, in Vom Kriege, 1176. 119. Clausewitz, “Bemerkungen über die reine und angewandte Strategie des Herrn von Bülow oder Kritik der darin enthaltenen Ansichten,” in Verstreute, 81–82. 120. See, for example, Clausewitz’s “Charakteristik mehrerer Russischer Generale,” where he reserves a separate column for his evaluation of the generals’ moral qualities (Schriften, vol. 2, part 2, 928–35). 121. Clausewitz, “Bemerkungen über die reine und angewandte Strategie des Herrn von Bülow oder Kritik der darin enthaltenen Ansichten,” in Verstreute, 82. 122. The essay is called “Mémoire sur la probabilité des causes par les événements.” 123. Daston, Classical Probability, 271. 124. “Ce calcul délicat s’étend aux questions les plus importantes de la vie, qui ne sont en effet, pour la plupart, que des problèmes de probabilité.” Pierre-Simon Laplace, Théorie analytique des probabilités (Paris: 1812), n.p. See also Pierre-Simon Laplace, Essai philosophique, 3rd ed. (Paris: 1816), 1. 125. For the origin and development of probability theory see Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 126. Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population, 280; Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 19, 30. 127. See in particular chapter 6, “Moralizing Mathematics,” in Daston, Classical Probability, 296–370.

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128. Not until 1837 was a clear demarcation between subjective and objective probability established, when Simeon-Denis Poisson published Recherches sur la probabilité des jugements en matières criminelles et matière civile. See Gigerenzer et al., The Empire of Chance, 35. 129. See Daston, Classical Probability, 188–89; Hacking, The Emergence of Probability, iv–v; Hacking, The Taming of Chance, 96–97. 130. Laplace, Essai philosophique, 73. 131. Ibid., 77. 132. See Maurice Crosland, “A Science Empire in Napoleonic France,” in History of Science 44 (2006): 30. 133. Laplace, Essai philosophique, 123. 134. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 207. 135. Ibid., 213. 136. Ibid., 234. 137. In 1806 Clausewitz used friction to describe one of the obstacles encountered by his teacher Scharnhorst within the higher military echelons. See Paret, Clausewitz and the State, 124. 138. Clausewitz, Schriften, 1: 337. 139. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 263. See also 208. The analogy to water is not fortuitous. The ocean has traditionally been regarded as the sphere of the uncertain, the dangerous, and the incalculable, and, as Hans Blumenberg has shown, shipwrecks have long served as a metaphor for a conception of life threatened by constant hazards. Hans Blumenberg, Schiff bruch mit Zuschauer: Paradigma einer Daseinsmetapher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 23. Clausewitz continues this tradition but gives it a military inflection when he writes that every war is “an untraveled ocean full of rocks that the commander’s mind can dimly sense, but has never seen and must now circumnavigate in the darkness of night” (Vom Kriege, 263). 140. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 237–38. 141. Ibid., 238. 142. Ibid., 254. 143. Ibid., 289. 144. One should not read a Romantic admiration for these half-luminescent, half-obscure phenomena into Clausewitz’s text. He explicitly regards it as the duty of theory to destroy the “cloud of theoretical prejudices” that bend the rays of the sun (ibid., 473). While in war such epistemic clouds are constitutive and cannot be eliminated, Clausewitz offers a diagnosis of a state of affairs and points to their existence as an actual problem that must be taken into consideration but that is overlooked by theories informed by obsolete conceptions of space and knowledge. 145. Clausewitz, Schriften, 1: 398; Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 262. 146. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 263. 147. Ibid., 251. 148. Ibid., 287.

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149. Ibid., 262. 150. See Alan Beyerchen, “Clausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the Unpredictability of War,” International Security 17, no. 3 (1992–1993): 59–90; Alan Beyerchen, “Clausewitz and the Non-Linear Nature of Warfare: Systems of Organized Complexity,” in Strachan and Herberg-Rothe, Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century. See also Stephen J. Cimbala, Clausewitz and Chaos: Friction in War and Military Policy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001); Niebisch, “Military Intelligence.” 151. Clausewitz, Schriften, 1: 78. 152. Carl von Clausewitz, Der Feldzug von 1815  in Frankreich, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Dümmler, 1862), 8: 164. 153. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 1179. 154. Ibid., 234. 155. Ibid., 263. 156. Ibid., 213.

3. Modus Operandi 1. “La guerre est surtout une affaire de tact.” Honoré de Balzac, Maximes et Pensées de Napoléon (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 1999), 36, no. 117. 2. Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2000), 3. 3. Ibid., 25. 4. Ibid., 25–26. Aristotle describes a related capacity with his theory of phronêsis (practical wisdom). In the Nicomachean Ethics the concept is conceived as a practical capability, namely to find the proper means for effective action. For Aristotle, however, phronêsis also carries an ethical dimension that is found neither in Kant nor, as we shall see, in Clausewitz. Practical wisdom requires that the goal of action is praiseworthy. The pure capability to act effectively Aristotle calls deinotês (cleverness). It is this underlying, morally neutral concept on which practical wisdom rests that comes closest to that of tact. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 1026–35. See also Otfried Höffe, Aristoteles, Die Nikomachische Ethik (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2006), 183. 5. Kant, Anthropologie, 44. 6. See Reinhard Brandt, Kritischer Kommentar zu Kants Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1999), 214. 7. Die Antropologie nach denen Vorleßungen des Herrn Professor Kant gelesen nach Baumgartens empirischer Psychologie, Petersburg edition, http://web.uni-marburg.de /kant/webseitn/gt_ho304.htm, 37. 8. Kant, Anthropologie, 25. 9. Ibid., 20. 10. Peter Schleuning, Die Fantasie I: 16. bis 18. Jahrhundert (Köln: Arno Volk Verlag, 1971), 13–17.

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11. For a somewhat different interpretation of the example see Jane Kneller, Kant and the Power of the Imagination (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 153–58. 12. Kant, Anthrolopogie, 21. 13. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 25. 15. Ibid., 26. 16. Ibid., 100. 17. Ibid., 85. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 268. 22. Ibid., 176. 23. According to Collins’s copy of the lectures from 1786, the example is taken from Montaigne. Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie: Akademischer Vortrag des Herrn Profeßor Kant in Königsberg in Preussen, lecture notes by Georg Ludwig Collins, http:// web.uni-marburg.de/kant/webseitn/gt_ho304.htm, 52. 24. Kant, Anthropologie, 176. 25. Ibid. 26. “The one who shines in the second rank, is eclipsed in the first” (ibid., 101; see also 103). 27. In the notes of the lectures taken by his students, a passage is frequently mentioned in which Kant says that the common soldier must be of a choleric temper so he will immediately strike the enemy when ordered to do so, instead of reflecting on the reasons for the order. The general, on the other hand, should be phlegmatic “such that he wins time to deliberate at length over a battle plan before he carries it out.” Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie des Herrn Prof. Kant in Königsberg, Isaac Abraham Euchel, http://web.uni-marburg.de/kant//webseitn/gt_ho304.htm, 305. 28. Carl von Clausewitz, Nachrichten über Preußen in seiner großen Katastrophe, Kriegsgeschichtliche Einzelschriften, Heft 10 (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1888), 503. 29. Ibid., 503. 30. Kiesewetter himself had a greater impact on Clausewitz than has previously been thought. See Antulio Joseph Echevarria’s detailed analysis in Clausewitz and Contemporary War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). For a suggestive reading of the relation between Kant and Clausewitz through the notion of art, see José Fernández Vega, “War as ‘Art’: Aesthetics and Politics in Clausewitz’s Social Thinking,” in Hew Strachan and Andreas Herberg-Rothe, eds., Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 122–38. One should be careful not to equate Kant’s notion of judgment with Clausewitz’s “tact of judgment” too strictly however, for the former is a product of the conscious parts of the cognitive apparatus, whereas the latter relies on subconscious activities that Kant mostly regards with suspicion.

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Wolf Kittler is therefore right to exchange the Cartesian model of the subject with a Lacanian one, even if he does not regard the subconscious as a catalyst for action. See Wolf Kittler, “Kleist und Clausewitz,” Kleist-Jahrbuch, 1998, 62–79. 31. Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege (Bonn: Dümmler, 1980), 1175–76. 32. Ibid., 961. Elsewhere he opposes tact to “ein Bettelthum von Regeln,” the poverty for rules. Carl von Clausewitz, Schriften—Aufsätze—Studien—Briefe, ed. Werner Hahlweg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966), vol. 2, part 2, 657. 33. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 284; Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2001), 193–94. See also Hartmut Böhme, “Krieg und Zufall,” in Marco Formisano and Hartmut Böhme, eds., War in Words: Transformations of War from Antiquity to Clausewitz (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), 409–10. This conception of military genius was not invented by Clausewitz, however. Already in 1809 Rühle von Lilienstern wrote that generals would find the proper rule of war only if they “forget all the rules they have been taught and indoctrinated, and, like true artists, create the new rule that is apt to the situation.” Otto August Rühle von Lilienstern, Bericht eines Augenzeugen, von dem Feldzuge der während den Monaten September und October 1806 unter dem Kommando des Fürsten zu Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen gestandenen Königl. preußischen und Kurfürstl. sächsischen Truppen (Tübingen: Cotta, 1809), 199. As we shall see, Kleist also presents a version of this argument in The Prince of Homburg. 34. In their unearthing of the Greek notion of métis, a kind of intelligence engaged in praxis, Jean-Pierre Detienne and Marcel Vernant claim that the concept disappears in the fourth century b.c. with the emergence of Greek philosophy. While Plato describes this form of intelligence in some detail, it is only in order to banish métis from proper knowledge, sophia. Jean-Pierre Detienne and Marcel Vernant, Les ruses de l’ intelligence: La métis des Grecs (Paris: Flammarion, 1974), 11, 304. In the transition from Kant to Clausewitz we can detect the opposite move. The state of war places demands that cannot be met by conventional epistemology. 35. Carl von Clausewitz, Übersicht des Sr. Königl. Hoheit dem Kronprinzen in den Jahren 1810, 1811 und 1812, in Vom Kriege, 1178, my emphasis. 36. Carl von Clausewitz, Politische Schriften und Briefe, ed. Hans Rothfels (München: Drei Masken Verlag, 1922), 66–67. All the following quotes are on these two pages. While the Greek métis is not conceived as a probabilistic phenomenon, Detienne and Vernant’s characterization of it applies equally to the concept of tact in Clausewitz, namely that it is “a mode of knowing that lies outside of the epistème, of systemic knowledge, it is a stranger to truth” (Les ruses de l’ intelligence, 10). 37. One therefore cannot, as Rainer Dieterich attempts, formalize the factors that enter into the calculation. Rainer Dieterich, “Carl von Clausewitz als Psychologe—Die ‘moralischen Größen’ im Lichte der Persönlichkeitspsychologie,” in Gerhard Vowinckel, ed., Clausewitz-Kolloquium: Theorie des Krieges als Sozialwissenschaft (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1993), 111–36. The tact of judgment cannot be replaced by the prescriptive statements of a theory, for it becomes operative precisely in situations that lack norms of action. See Panajotis Kondylis, Theorie des Krieges: Clausewitz—Marz—Engels—Lenin (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1988), 78–79.

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38. Clausewitz, Politische Schriften und Briefe, 44. 39. Ibid., 66. 40. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 234. 41. Clausewitz, Schriften, vol. 2, part 2, 864–65. In Die Feldzüge von 1799, Clausewitz further claims that the various elements of logical reasoning are separate from one another because logic develops serially, whereas in the tact of judgment the parts have coalesced into a single whole and gain their efficacy from this fusion. In Hinterlassene Werke (Berlin: Dümmler, 1858), 6: 14. See also Kondylis, Theorie des Krieges, 64–95. 42. Clausewitz, Politische Schriften und Briefe, 66. 43. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 945, 369. 44. Napoléon, Maximes de guerre de Napoléon (Adamant Media Corporation, 2006), 42. (facsimile of the edition published in 1837 by the Société Belge de Librairie in Bruxelles). 45. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 1176, 233. Michel Serres suggests that where shadow and clarity belong to the order of geometry, darkness is concerned with optical space and retains Euclidean volume. Fog, however, “occupies a variety of topologies and is concerned with the continuous or ragged space of touch.” Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (New York: Continuum, 2008), 69. In the modal space outlined by Clausewitz a similar shift of perceptive organs takes place at the metaphorical level: in the crepuscular light of all appearances, the “feeling out of truth” takes the place of “deep, clear insight” (Vom Kriege, 244–45). 46. Speaking of a related concept, the coup d’oeil, Ulrike Kleemeier describes it as a “union of feeling and reason.” Ulrike Kleemeier, “Moral Forces in War,” in Strachan and Herberg-Rothe, Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century, 113. 47. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 242. The hybrid nature of tact is also pointed out by the French commander Pierre Alexandre Joseph Allent, who in an essay on reconnaissance speaks of “ce tact, pour ainsi dire, involontaire.” Allent, “Essai sur les reconnaissances militaires,” in Mémorial topographique et militaire rédigé au dépôt général de la guerre (Paris: L’Imprimerie de la république, 1803), 4: 42. 48. Elisabeth Krimmer is quite right to note that Clausewitz to some extent seeks “to subjugate war as a blind force of nature to the reign of reason and politics.” Yet he also points to certain structural features that war and politics have in common. Underneath their apparent opposition, the two fields share a number of conditions—conditions that first become clearly visible in the analysis of war. Elisabeth Krimmer, The Representation of War in German Literature from 1800 to the Present (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 25–26. 49. Michel Foucault, Il faut défendre la société: Cours au Collège de France, 1975– 1976 (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 1997). Herfried Münkler states that already in 1919 Wilhelm Dilthey wrote that peace is the continuation of war with other means, and Oswald Spengler uttered a similar thought, yet only with Foucault is the inversion of Clausewitz’s dictum used for a more extensive analysis of civil society. See Herfried Münkler, Gewalt und Ordnung: Das Bild des Krieges im politischen Denken (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1992), 26. Toward the end of the lecture

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course, however, Foucault raises some doubts as to whether war can actually be used as a template to analyze society, whether it is not too simple a model. 50. Clausewitz, Schriften, 434. 51. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 299. This has received some attention in the philosophy and sociology of action. Ernst Vollrath considers tact a form of knowledge that is specific to “oppositional action” (Gegenhandeln), while Hans Wilhelm Hetzler considers Clausewitz’s theory of action through the lens of Max Weber’s theory of social action. Ernst Vollrath, “ ‘Neue Wege der Klugheit’: Zum methodischen Prinzip der Theorie des Handelns bei Clausewitz,” Zeitschrift für Politik, Jahrgang 31, Heft 1, März 1984, 53–77; Ernst Vollrath, “Carl von Clausewitz, eine mit dem Handeln befreundete Theorie,” in Gerhard Vowinckel, ed., Clausewitz-Kolloquium: Theorie des Krieges als Sozialwissenschaft, Beiträge zur Politischen Wissenschaft, Band 65 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1993), 63–78; Hans Wilhelm Hetzler, “ ‘Bewegung im erschwerenden Mittel’: Handlungstheoretische Elemente bei Carl von Clausewitz,” in Vowinckel, Clausewitz-Kolloquium, 45–61. 52. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 299. 53. See also ibid., 292. 54. Already in his early essay “Über Kunst und Kunsttheorie,” Clausewitz claims that warfare should be regarded as an art rather than a science, and war itself he here regards as a work of art. In Vom Kriege, however, he qualifies these statements, since the artist at war does not operate on a dead matter but on a living material whose reactions cannot be predicted with certainty. Vom Kriege, 303; Geist und Tat: Das Vermächtnis des Soldaten und Denkers, ed. Dr. Walther Malmsten Schering (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1942), 153–65. See also Raymond Aron, Penser la guerre, Clausewitz, vol. 1: L’ âge européen (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1976), 452–53. 55. Hans-Joachim Kreuzer cautions against identifying Heinrich von Kleist with the Kleist who was a member of the Christlich-Deutsche Tischgesellschaft that Clausewitz frequented. “(Review): Helmut Sembdner (Hrsg.), Heinrich von Kleists Lebensspuren (1964), Heinrich von Kleists Nachruhm (1967), Kleist-Bibliographie 1803–1862 (1966),” in Euphorion 62 (1968): 188–224, especially 210–12. A similar view is represented by Gerhard Schulz in Heinrich von Kleist: Eine Biographie (München: C. H. Beck, 2007), 464. Both Peter Paret, and more recently, Philipp von Hilgers, argue that most likely they were indeed personally acquainted. Peter Paret, “Kleist and Clausewitz: A Comparative Sketch,” in Peter Paret, ed., Understanding War: Essays on Clausewitz and the History of Military Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 161; Philipp von Hilgers, Kriegsspiele: Eine Geschichte der Ausnahmezustände und Unberechenbarkeiten (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2008), 52. 56. The parallels between Kleist and Clausewitz have been briefly mentioned by Peter Paret, who establishes general connections between them in Clausewitz and the State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 8–9, and in the essay “Kleist and Clausewitz.” The most important texts on these matters are Kittler’s “Kleist und Clausewitz” and Hans-Christian von Hermann’s “Bewegliche Heere: Zur Kalkulation des Irregulären bei Kleist und Clausewitz,” Kleist-Jahrbuch, 1998, 227–43.

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57. Wolf Kittler’s impressive political reading of Kleist in Die Geburt des Partisanen points to their related ideas on the restructuring of the Prussian Army, but the book leaves little room for the central epistemological and praxeological issues that both regard as fundamental to the state of war. Die Geburt des Partisanen aus dem Geist der Poesie: Heinrich von Kleist und die Strategie der Befreiungskriege (Freiburg: Rombach, 1987). A recent book by Martina Lüke also pursues the political line of inquiry: Worte wie Waff en: Krieg und Romantik (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2013). An example of the legal perspective can be found in Manfred Schneider’s article on the state of exception in Kleist, which examines war as a juridical category: “Die Welt im Ausnahmezustand. Kleists Kriegstheater,” Kleist-Jahrbuch, 2001, 104–19. 58. The question of which of Kant’s texts Kleist refers to has a long history in Kleist scholarship. In 1919 Ernst Cassirer suggested that Kleist had read Fichte’s Bestimmung des Menschen. In midcentury Ludwig Muth argued that Kleist read Kritik der Urteilskraft, and more recently Uffe Hansen has argued that Kleist read an introduction to Kantian philosophy by the Frenchman Charles de Villers. Ernst Cassirer, Heinrich von Kleist und die Kantische Philosophie (Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1919); Ludwig Muth, “Kleist und Kant—Versuch einer neuen Interpretation,” Kantstudien 68 (1954): 1–83; Uffe Hansen, “Grenzen der Erkenntnis und unmittelbare Schau. Heinrich von Kleists Kant-Krise und Charles de Villers,” DVJS 79 (2005): 433–71. The secondary literature on the impact of Kantian philosophy on Kleist’s literary oeuvre is vast. The work of Bernhard Greiner is exemplary in this regard; see, for example, the articles “Die Wende in der Kunst—Kleist mit Kant,” Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 64 (1990): 96–117, and “ ‘Die neueste Philosophie in dieses Land verpflanzen’—Kleists literarische Experimente mit Kant,” KleistJahrbuch 1998, 176–208, as well as Kleists Dramen und Erzählungen (Stuttgart: UTB, 2000). Tim Mehigan argues that Kleist remains mired in the Humean skepticism that Kant outlined only in order to surpass it. See his article “ ‘Betwixt a False Reason and None at All’: Kleist, Hume, Kant, and the ‘Thing in Itself,’ ” in Bernd Fischer, ed., A Companion to the Works of Heinrich von Kleist (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003), 165–88, as well as his recent book Heinrich von Kleist: Writing after Kant (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011). At the same time the very notion of a Kant crisis has been cast into doubt by Jochen Schmidt, who claims that it is merely “eine inszenierte Scheinkrise” that only serves as a pretext for Kleist’s wish to discontinue his scientific career. Heinrich von Kleist—Die Dramen und Erzählungen in ihrer Epoche (Darmstadt: Wissenschaflicher Buchgesellschaft, 2003), 15. Schmidt’s first book concludes, “Thus, one can hardly speak of any Kant crisis.” Heinrich von Kleist—Studien zu seiner poetischen Verfahrensweise (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1974), 5. More recently, however, Gerhard Schulz writes in his magisterial biography, “Nevertheless, there is no question that Kleist took notice of Kant’s thoughts and that he was impressed and influenced by aspects of his philosophy” (Heinrich von Kleist, 208). On the Kant-Kleist debate there is little consensus. Rather than rehearsing the arguments that have governed Kleist scholarship for decades, however, it seems more fruitful to change the frame and to map Kleist’s relation to Kant and to epistemology

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onto the discourse on war that emerged in the same period and of which his work forms a part. If one person must be held responsible for Kleist’s epistemic theories, the general from Corsica is probably a better candidate than the philosopher from Königsberg. 59. There are two notable exceptions: Philipp von Hilger’s history of war games, Kriegsspiele, and Hans-Christian von Hermann’s article on calculation in war, “Bewegliche Heere.” Helpful as they are, they pay hardly any attention to the actual texts and therefore offer little insight into the specifically Kleistian construction of the state of war. 60. In its Enlightenment sense, of course, the term denotes much more than simply education, namely the personal development of character and the fulfillment of intellectual capacities. For this reason I have mostly left it untranslated. On the development and connotations of Bildung see G. Felicitas Munzel, “Kant, Hegel and the Rise of Pedagogical Science,” in Randall Curren, ed., A Companion to the Philosophy of Education (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 113–129; Frederick C. Beiser, “Romanticism,” in Curren, A Companion to the Philosophy of Education, 130–42; E. Lichtenstein, “Bildung,” in Joachim Ritter, ed., Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Basel: Schwabe, 1971–2007), 1: 922–938. 61. Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001), 2: 479–83. 62. Ibid., 2: 480. 63. Ibid., 2: 479. 64. Ibid., 2: 485. The letter is addressed to Kleist’s tutor, Christian Ernst Martini, Potsdam, March 18–19, 1799. 65. Ibid., 2: 488. 66. As Helmut Sembdner notes, Kleist’s sentence “A free, thinking human being does not remain standing where he was pushed by chance; or if he does, then it is because he has reasons, because he chose it as the better option” is an almost direct quote from one of the central texts of the German Enlightenment, Lessing’s Nathan der Weise: “A man, like you, remains not just where birth / Has chanced to cast him, or, if he remains there, / Does it from insight, choice, grounds of preference.” Helmut Sembdner in Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 966. The line from Lessing is in William Taylor’s early translation: G. E. Lessing, Nathan the Wise (London: R. Philips, 1805), 144. 67. Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 488–89. 68. Ibid., 2: 490. 69. Ibid., 2: 488, 491. 70. Ibid., 2: 505. 71. Kant, Anthropologie, paragraph 59, p. 138. 72. Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 504. 73. Ibid., 2: 627. Such an imposed time constraint also found fictional expression in the short anecdote “Sonderbarer Rechtsfall in England,” in which the twelve members of a jury are locked up in a room without food or drink until they have reached a decision (2: 281–82).

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74. Ibid., 2: 629. 75. Novalis, Novalis Werke, ed. Gerhard Schulz (München: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1987), 226–28. 76. Lüke, Worte wie Waff en. 77. See, for example, Kittler, Die Geburt des Partisanen, 282. For a recent restatement of this view see Schulz, Heinrich von Kleist, 499. Seán Allan comments on the secondary literature, “The difficulties in upholding either protagonist as an idealised figure in the play has prompted most critics to see the play as ending in a synthesis of the two positions, a view which is sometimes referred to as the ‘education thesis.’ Thus the play is said to depict a process of education in which the (naïve) Prince is ‘educated’ by the (benevolent) Elector to a proper understanding of the nature of military discipline.” Seán Allan, The Plays of Heinrich von Kleist: Ideals and Illusions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 297. While the present argument is more concerned with epistemic models than with military discipline, it does consider the theme of education, but, as we shall see, the roles are reversed. 78. Novalis, Novalis Werke, 261. 79. Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 1: 641. Gerhard Schulz points out that the battle plan is Kleist’s free invention and is more reminiscent of the battles of Jena and Auerstedt a few years earlier than the one at Fehrbellin it purportedly describes (Heinrich von Kleist, 499). 80. Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 1: 645. 81. Ibid., 1: 644. 82. Ibid., 1: 646. 83. The nexus between war and love, which forms a central and pervasive theme in almost all of Kleist’s writings, introduces a gender perspective on war that has received little attention. An exception is Elisabeth Krimmer’s article “The Gender of Terror: War as an (Im)Moral Institution in Kleist’s Hermannsschlacht and Penthesilea,” German Quarterly 81, no. 1 (2008): 66–85. 84. That Homburg’s sudden attack is also guided by ulterior motives is evident: his desire to prove himself for Princess Natalie. Manuel Köppen also reads the play as a “memento for heroic times.” Köppen, Das Entsetzen des Beobachters: Krieg und Medien im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2005), 58. Yet, as Kottwitz’s subsequent apology for Homburg’s action on the battlefield makes clear, it is interpreted primarily from the point of view of military theory. 85. Clausewitz, Hinterlassene Werke, 6: 14. 86. The visual and auditory connection between tact and tactics, however, is misleading. They do not have a common etymology. Where tact, as mentioned, stems from the Latin tactus, “to touch,” tactics goes back to the Greek tassein, “to arrange, to order.” Yet in spite of their diverging etymologies, both terms are predicated upon the immediacy of a situated position in medias res. 87. Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 337. 88. Compare Richard Samuel’s commentary: “Herz, liebliche Gefühle, Empfindung sind Kleistische Begriffe, welche den Impuls vertreten, der auf eine instink-

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tive Intuition reagiert.” Heinrich von Kleist, Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, ed. Richard Samuel (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1964), 184. 89. Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 323. As Nancy Nobile writes, this means that knowledge is less a state of mind and more a state of emergency. Nancy Nobile, The School of Days (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), 106. 90. Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1854–1971), vol. 5, columns 3293–328. 91. Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 338. That these ideas were not restricted to the world of Prussian thought but had a wider currency can be gleaned from a French general’s essay on reconnaissance. He writes, “In war, during those reconnaissances in which time, the general, the enemy permit no more than a coup d’oeil, all is lost if the officer reflects; the moment for action passes while he deliberates” (Allent, “Essai sur les reconnaissances militaires,” 4: 35). 92. Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 782, emphases in original. 93. Rühle, Bericht eines Augenzeugen, 192–93. 94. Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 638. 95. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 14. 96. Rühle von Lilienstern formulates it in the following terms: “At the critical moment, the important thing is less to think than to act, and even when this is not entirely the case, you must nevertheless carry out and accomplish whatever you have understood to be correct and useful. Then the feeling [das Gemüth] takes over the place of the mind: the moral force must give the decisive impulse.” Otto August Rühle von Lilienstern, Handbuch—Erste Abteilung (Berlin: Reimer, 1817), 12. 97. Carl von Clausewitz, Hinterlassene Werke (Berlin: Dümmler, 1862), 10: 197. 98. Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 1: 671. 99. Ibid., 1: 697. 100. Ibid., 1: 687. 101. Ibid., 1: 688. 102. Ibid., 1: 687. 103. Ibid., 1: 690. 104. Bruno Latour, “Les ‘Vues’ de l’Esprit: Une introduction à l’anthropologie des sciences et des techniques” Réseaux 5, no. 27 (1987): 84. His later book Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987) develops this idea further. In the influential essay, however, Latour seeks to show that the mobilization of allies is dramatically boosted by the development of “immutable mobiles,” that is, inscriptions that live up to certain criteria of consistency, reproducibility, mobility, and so on. In Kleist’s play this aspect of the development of new knowledge is restricted to the medium of writing. As the following chapter will show, images are not absent from Kleist’s world, but in The Prince of Homburg the recruitment of allies proceeds along the means of written and verbal persuasion, not by way of a “cascade of images” (“Les ‘Vues’ de l’Esprit,” 89). 105. Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 1: 703. 106. Ibid., 1: 696.

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107. Allan, The Plays of Heinrich von Kleist, 242. 108. Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 1: 696–97. 109. Ibid., 1: 697. 110. Ibid., 1: 698. 111. Seán Allan rightly points out that Kottwitz never addresses the issue of insubordination in his defense of Homburg (The Plays of Heinrich von Kleist, 249). Rather the defense is predicated upon a theory of the state of war. 112. Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 1: 698. 113. Ibid., 1: 699. 114. Ibid., 1: 702. 115. Ibid., 1: 698. 116. Jacques Derrida, “Le Siècle et le pardon,” in Foi et Savoir (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000), 120. 117. See Kathleen Dean Moore, Pardons: Justice, Mercy, and the Public Interest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 15–22. 118. Hans Joachim Kreutzer states that the elector here displays less the arbitrariness of the absolute monarch than the randomness of the gambler. Heinrich von Kleist (München: C. H. Beck, 2011), 74–75. Given the probabilistic foundation of Homburg’s judgment, the connection to gambling is apt, but the central role of the pardon is undoubtedly due to its problematic nature within the framework of the law. 119. When Gerhard Schulz claims that with the Prince of Homburg Kleist wanted not only to praise the fame of his fatherland but also to place law and duty above anarchy and freedom, this misses the elector’s method of acting in the pardon, and, as I have tried to show, these categories cover up more central ones in the play. Schulz, Heinrich von Kleist, 499. 120. Hilda Brown is surely correct to point out that too much emphasis has been placed on the negative qualities of the elector in the secondary literature. Heinrich von Kleist: The Ambiguity of Art and the Necessity of Form (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 378. One should keep in mind, however, that his most positive action in the play is the pardon, by which he adopts Homburg’s model of decision making and acts as his double. 121. Clausewitz, Schriften, vol. 2, part 2, 658. Clausewitz’s statement is, of course, inflected by the legal codifications of the time. The Allgemeines Landrecht für die Preußischen Staaten appeared in 1794 during the reign of Friedrich Wilhelm II, while the Napoleonic Code was established in 1804. See also Theodore Ziolkowski, The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crises (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Ziolkowski claims that all Kleist’s texts affirm the newly established Prussian codification (210–11). Kleist usually complicates a clear affirmation of legal principles, however, and The Prince of Homburg shows that in the state of war laws cannot be codified at all. Precepts serve merely as guidelines that on the one hand are subject to constant revision and on the other hand can be invented on the spot. 122. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 194. 123. Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 1: 698.

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124. Ibid., 1: 706. 125. Several of Kleist’s texts are directly concerned with probability, and as Rüdiger Campe writes in his analysis of “Unwahrscheinliche Wahrhaftigkeiten,” almost all of them take place in a military setting. Rüdiger Campe, Spiel der Wahrscheinlichkeit: Literatur und Berechnung zwischen Pascal und Kleist (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2002), 430. In the Prince of Homburg, however, it becomes evident that the state of war does not merely form a background for Kleist’s interest in probability; it is itself perceived as an epistemic regime. 126. See Wolfgang Schäffner, “Nicht-Wissen um 1800: Buchführung und Statistik,” in Joseph Vogl, ed. Poetologien des Wissens um 1800 (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag), 2010. 127. John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action. The Later Works, 1935–1953, vol. 4: 1929 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 235.

4. Exercising Judgment 1. Bernhard von Poten, “Rühle von Lilienstern, August,” in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, vol. 29 (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1889), 611–15. 2. The book was published in Berlin in 1818, but it dates back to a lecture series Rühle prepared toward the end of 1811 for the winter semester in Dresden. Due to the impending war between France and Russia, however, the lectures were canceled, and instead he published them as essays seven years later. 3. Otto August Rühle von Lilienstern, Aufsätze über Gegenstände und Ereignisse aus dem Gebiete des Kriegswesens (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler, 1818), 11. 4. “Thinking only calls on half of the human being so to speak; action engages the whole human being. Spirit, body, and feeling [Gemüth], nothing must be absent if life is to reveal itself in fullness and with force” (ibid., 17). 5. Ibid., 13. Ernst von Pfuel, friend of both Rühle and Kleist, calls it living, unconscious knowledge, and he goes so far as to define genius as “the complete absence of all effort during practical exercise.” Ernst von Pfuel, “Ueber das Studium der Kriegsgeschichte,” Deutsches Museum 1 (1812): 235. 6. For the historical transformation of the multifaceted concept of Bildung, see Reinhart Koselleck, “On the Anthropological and Semantic Structure of Bildung,” in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 170–207. 7. Rühle, Aufsätze, 16. 8. Ibid., 25. 9. Ibid., 443–44. 10. Johann Friedrich Herbart, Sämtliche Werke in chronologischer Reihenfolge, ed. Karl Kehrbach and Otto Flügel (Langensalza: Hermann Beyer, 1887), 1: 285. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 286.

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13. Ibid., 1: 286. 14. Ibid., 1: 290. 15. Rotraud Coriand, “Jena als Ort der Lehrerbildung,” in Laboratorium Bildungsreform, Jena als Zentrum pädagogischer Innovationen, ed. Ralf Koerrenz (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2009), 100. 16. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile ou De l’ éducation (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 290. 17. Ibid., 206. 18. Ibid., 286. 19. As Chenxi Tang notes, for Rousseau spatial experience takes precedence over rational principles of orientation. Chenxi Tang, The Geographic Imagination of Modernity: Geography, Literature, and Philosophy in German Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 42. 20. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, ABC der Anschauung, oder Anschauungs-Lehre der Maßverhältnisse, Zweites Heft (Zürich: Heinrich Geßner, 1803). See also Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Wie Gertrud ihre Kinder lehrt (Zürich: Heinrich Geßner, 1801), 234. 21. Pestalozzi, Gertrud, 277. 22. See Joan DeJean, Literary Fortifications: Rousseau, Laclos, Sade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 132. 23. Carl von Clausewitz, Politische Schriften und Briefe, ed. Hans Rothfels (München: Drei Masken Verlag, 1922), 131. 24. Clausewitz is referring to one of the main characters in Schiller’s play Wallenstein. Carl von Clausewitz and Maria von Clausewitz, Ein Lebensbild in Briefen und Tagebuchblättern, ed. Karl Linnebach (Berlin: Verlag von Martin Warneck, 1925), 83. 25. Carl von Clausewitz, Schriften—Aufsätze—Studien—Briefe, ed. Werner Hahlweg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966), 1: 434. 26. Ludwig Freidrich Erck, Anleitung zum zweckmässigen Studium der Kriegswissenschaft: Von einem norddeutschen Officiere (Leipzig: Hahn, 1828), 96. 27. Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001), 2: 319. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 2: 320. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 2: 323. 32. Ibid., 2: 321. In a letter from 1801 Kleist had expressed a similar view, but there informed by a moral concern: “What does it mean to do something evil if we judge from its effects? What is evil? Absolute evil? The things of the world are linked and intertwined in a thousand ways, every action is the mother of a million others, and often the worst generate the best—Tell me, who on this earth has ever done something evil? Something that would remain evil in all eternity—?” (2: 683). 33. Ibid., 2: 320. 34. Shortly afterward, in 1812, Berenhorst would make a similar connection. Responding to Valentini’s claim that Clausewitz believed there was no great art to devising a good plan of operations, he replied, “So far as plans of operations are con-

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cerned, I tend to agree with him. They resemble the pedagogues’ plan of education: the former are rendered absurd in one way or another by unforeseen circumstances; the latter, by the potential and peculiarities of the individuals to be educated. ‘Then should we proceed without a plan, just into the blue?’ I wish I could reply ‘yes,’ but fear of the gentlemen who think in formulae holds me back.” Quoted in Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 206. Where in Kleist plans are substituted by the operations of feeling (Gemüt) and turned into an efficient means of action, for Berenhorst there is no possibility of managing the stochastic phenomenon of war. 35. Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 319. 36. In Felicitas Munzel’s succinct formulation, “The Enlightenment as self-conceived was in its essence an enormous pedagogical project.” G. Felicitas Munzel, “Kant, Hegel and the Rise of Pedagogical Science,” in Randall Curren, ed., A Companion to the Philosophy of Education (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 115. See also Frederick Beiser’s article in the same volume, “Romanticism,” 130–142, especially 134. 37. Immanuel Kant, Über Pädagogik in Werke in Sechs Bänden (Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1998), 6: 699. 38. Although running a satirical errand, Jean Paul also points to this link: “To write about education, however, almost means to write about everything at once since education has to attend to and guard the developments of a whole world even if it is a miniature world (a microcosm of the microcosm).” Jean Paul, Werke, vol. 5: Levana, oder Erziehlehre (München: C. Hanser, 1959), 526. 39. Kant, Über Pädagogik, 6: 700. 40. Ibid., 6: 707. Kant does consider autodidactic learning and values it highly because, he claims, we remember things best that we have taught ourselves. But he thinks that there are very few people capable of becoming such “αyτοδιδακτοι.” For Kant this method of learning is the exception rather than the rule (6: 736). 41. Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 319. 42. See Nancy Nobile, The School of Days: Heinrich von Kleist and the Traumas of Education (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), 21–22. 43. In the modern vocabulary of Bourdieu, one might speak of the development of a habitus, the quasi-unconscious strategizing principle that allows us to handle unexpected situations. The habitus is formed by the interiorization of external circumstances, and it is this immediate compatibility with the actual world that lends it its practical, operative efficacy. For Bourdieu, this strategizing principle is not a fixed entity but is modified as circumstances change. See Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000), 257. That Bourdieu chose the word habitus to designate this complex faculty was undoubtedly because the originally Latin term designates a condition that can be both physical and mental. The same applies to its derivation, habit. 44. Rousseau, Émile, 257. 45. Kant, Über Pädagogik, 6: 721. 46. Ibid., 6: 755.

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47. Clausewitz expresses a similar view: “The agent must yield to the finer tact of judgment which, arising from natural astuteness and shaped through reflection, hits the mark almost subconsciously.” Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege (Bonn: Dümmler, 1980), 401. 48. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1978), 28. Wolf Kittler rightly points to the common goal of Fichte’s Reden and some of Kleist’s texts, namely to incite German people to an insurrection against the French occupation. This political consensus, however, does not, as he claims, extend to their views on the constitution of the subject. See Wolf Kittler, Die Geburt des Partisanen aus dem Geist der Poesie: Heinrich von Kleist und die Strategie der Befreiungskriege (Freiburg: Rombach, 1987), 327. While Kleist is also a fervent advocate of national essentialism (see, for example, Katechismus der Deutschen from 1809), his subject is neither absolute nor completed but constantly modified by empirical circumstances and open to change. 49. Erck, Anleitung, 110; Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 324. See also Rühle, Aufsätze, 191. 50. Rudolf Vaupel, Die Reorganisation des Preußischen Staates unter Stein und Hardenberg, Zweiter Teil: Das Preußische Heer vom Tilsiter Frieden bis zur Befreiung 1807–1814, vol. 1, in Publikationen aus den Preußischen Staatsarchiven, vol. 94 (Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel, 1938), xi–xiii. See also Ute Frevert, A Nation in Barracks: Modern Germany, Military Conscription and Civil Society (Oxford: Berg, 2004); Ute Frevert, “Citizen-Soldiers: General Conscription in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Elisabeth Krimmer and Patricia Anne Simpson, eds., Enlightened War: German Theories and Cultures of Warfare from Frederick the Great to Clausewitz (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011), 219–37. 51. Rühle, Aufsätze, 214. 52. Vaupel, Die Reorganisation des Preußischen Staates, 186. 53. Wilhelm Traugott Krug, Der Staat und die Schule, Oder Politik und Pädagogik in ihrem gegenseitigen Verhältnisse zur Begründung einer Staatspädagogik dargestellt (Leipzig: bei Georg Joachim Göschen, 1810), 123–24. 54. Wilhelm Traugott Krug, “Abhandlung über die Nothwendigkeit des Studiums der Kriegswissenschaften auf teutschen Universitäten,” in System der Kriegswissenschaften (Leipzig: bei Wilhelm Rein, 1815), 123. 55. In practice, however, the new role of the army as the “people’s teacher” was also met with some resistance among skeptical officers who did not think it fell within their realm of expertise and who feared that the army would undergo a civilizing process that weakened its military function. See Frevert, A Nation in Barracks, 73–74. 56. Rühle, Aufsätze, 193. 57. Ibid., 17. 58. Ibid., 397, 17. 59. Georg Heinrich von Berenhorst, Betrachtungen über die Kriegskunst, über ihre Fortschritte, ihre Widersprüche und ihre Zuverlässigkeit (Osnabrück: Biblio Verlag, 1978), 2: 216.

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60. Carl von Clausewitz, Nachrichten über Preußen in seiner großen Katastrophe, Kriegsgeschichtliche Einzelschriften, Heft 10 (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1888), 429. 61. Ibid., 428, 420. 62. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 265–66. 63. See Bernhard J. Dotzler, “Simulation,” in Karlheinz Barck et al., eds., Ästhetische Grundbegriff e: Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, vol. 5: Postmoderne— Synästhesie, (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler Verlag, 2003), 509–34. 64. See Friedrich Kittler, “Fiktion und Simulation,” in Philosophien der neuen Technologie (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1989), 57–80. 65. Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1969); Jean Baudrillard, L’ échange symbolique et la mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1976); Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et simulations (Paris: Galilée, 1981). 66. This is also the frame that informs both Mihai Iuliu Spariosu’s unpublished dissertation, “Literature as Simulation: Principles of a Non-Mimetic Poetics of Fiction” (Stanford University, 1976) as well as the anthology edited by Andreas Kablitz and Gerhard Neumann, Mimesis und Simulation (Freiburg: Rombach Verlag, 1998). In the latter volume see especially Gabriele Brandstetter’s article on fakes and plagiarism, “ ‘Fälschung wie sie ist, unverfälscht’: Über Models, Mimikry und Fake,” 419–51, and Wolfgang Iser, “Mimesis und Emergenz,” 669–84. In like manner, David Wellbery in the same volume investigates simulacra in German Romanticism as an ambiguous, even ghostly form. While he does not specify the latter term, he makes a useful distinction between simulacra and simulations. David Wellbery, “Verzauberung: Das Simulakrum in der romantischen Lyrik,” 351–79. Following this distinction, we might characterize the object of the initial theorizing as simulacra, whereas the second and more recent tendency takes simulations as their object of study. As I will show, the ontological questions that haunt simulacra recede into the background and make room for an interest in the functional, operative workings of simulations. 67. Baudrillard, Simulacres et simulations, 11. 68. Paul F. Roth, “Simulation,” in A. R. Reilly und E. D. Reilly, eds., Encyclopedia of Computer Science (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992), 1204, quoted in Dotzler, “Simulation,” 516. 69. Elena Esposito, Die Fiktion der wahrscheinlichen Realität (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), 9, 31, 61, 120. Esposito speaks of “fiction” rather than simulation, but it closely approximates the latter in the sense explained above. 70. An example of such complexity is the notion of emergence, which Manuel Delanda seeks to model using simulations. For him too simulations that can mimic dynamic processes are regarded as laboratory experiments that offer insights into the workings of real phenomena that are otherwise difficult to grasp. Manuel Delanda, Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason (London: Continuum Books, 2011). 71. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 1180. 72. Erck, Anleitung, 49, 99.

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73. Ibid., 49. 74. Ibid. 75. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein und der Wiener Kreis (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1984), 163, 174. See also Philipp von Hilgers, Kriegsspiele: Eine Geschichte der Ausnahmezustände und Unberechenbarkeiten (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2008), 144–46. 76. See, above all, Hilgers, Kriegsspiele; Claus Pias, Computer—Spiel—Welten (München: Sequenzia, 2002). Among the several less scholarly works devoted to war games a useful source is Peter P. Perla, The Art of Wargaming (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute, 1990). For the later impact of war games in Germany and in particular on Helmuth von Moltke see Hajo Holborn, “The Prusso-German School: Moltke and the Rise of the General Staff ” in Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 281–95; David Ian Hall, “Battlefield Tours and Staff Rides: Prussian and German Traditions,” Connections. The Quarterly Journal of the Partnership for Peace Consortium of Defence Academics and Security Studies Institutes 1, no. 3 (2005): 93–101. 77. Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig, Versuch eines aufs Schachspiel gebaueten taktischen Spiels von zwey und mehreren Personen zu Spielen (Leipzig: Siegfried Lebrecht Crusius, 1780). 78. For a detailed analysis of Hellwig’s game from 1780 see Pias, Computer— Spiel—Welten, 204–13. 79. Hellwig, Versuch, 13. 80. Ibid., 14. 81. Ibid., 151, 164. 82. Anon. [M.M.], Le Jeu de la guerre, ou raffinement du jeu des echecs / Neues Kriegsspiel, oder: verbessertes Schachspiel (Prague: chez François Augustin Hoechenberger, 1770). 83. Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig, Das Kriegsspiel: ein Versuch die Wahrheit verschiedener Regeln der Kriegskunst in einem unterhaltenden Spiele anschaulich zu machen (Braunschweig: bei Karl Reichard, 1803), 2. As is also indicated by the new title, the second edition significantly plays down the genealogy of the war game and its emergence out of the game of chess. 84. Hellwig, Versuch, xi, xii. 85. Hellwig, Das Kriegsspiel, iv. 86. See also Pias, Computer—Spiel—Welten, 209. 87. Hellwig, Das Kriegsspiel, iii. The explicit exclusion of chance is also noted in the anonymous review “Kriegswissenschaften,” Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung, no. 132 (May 1804): 255. 88. Hellwig, Versuch, 144. 89. Georg Venturini, Beschreibung und Regeln eines neuen Krieges-Spiels, zum Nutzen und Vergnügen, besonders aber zum Gebrauch in Militair-Schulen (Schleswig: bey J. G. Röhß, 1797), xvi, emphasis added. 90. Ibid., xvi–xvii.

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91. Georg Venturini, Darstellung eines neuen Kriegsspiels zum Gebrauch für Offiziere und in Militärschulen (Leipzig: bey Johann Conrad Hinrichs, 1804), 2. The work was published posthumously; Venturini died in 1802. 92. No exhaustive study of the war games of the period has been written. In addition to the works of the authors and inventors mentioned by Philipp von Hilgers, Claus Pias, and Peter Perla (viz. Hellwig, Hoverbeck, Reißwitz, and Chamblanc), my own research has dug up the following: M. M., Le Jeu de la guerre, ou raffinement du jeu des echecs / Neues Kriegsspiel, oder: verbessertes Schachspiel (Prague: chez François Augustin Hoechenberger, 1770); Johann Allgaier, Neue theoretisch-praktische Anweisung zum Schachspiel. 2, Das neue Kriegsspiel, das uralte Königsspiel, das pythagoräische oder arithmetische Schachspiel, eine Abhandlung über das Schachspiel unter drey oder vier Personen (Wien: Rötzel, 1796); Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig, Das Kriegsspiel: ein Versuch die Wahrheit verschiedener Regeln der Kriegskunst in einem unterhaltenden Spiele anschaulich zu machen (Braunschweig: bei Karl Reichard, 1803); Georg Venturini, Beschreibung und Regeln eines neuen Krieges-Spiels, zum Nutzen und Vergnügen, besonders aber zum Gebrauch in Militair-Schulen (Schleswig: bey J. G. Röhß, 1797); Georg Venturini, Darstellung eines neuen Kriegsspiels zum Gebrauch für Offi ziere und in Militärschulen (Leipzig: bey Johann Conrad Hinrichs, 1804); Johann Ferdinand Opiz, Das Opiz’sche Kriegsspiel, ein Beitrag zur Bildung künftiger und zur Unterhaltung selbst der erfahrensten Taktiker (Halle: Hendels Verlag, 1806); Wilhelm Freiherr von Aretin, Strategonon, Versuch die Kriegführung durch ein Spiel anschaulich darzustellen (Ansbach: Dollfuss, 1830). Pierer’s Universal Lexicon from 1860 adds the following: Major J. J. von Glöden, Das Kriegsspiel, oder Versuch den Kampf zweyer gegen einander kriegführender Armeen nachzuahmen (Hamburg: Appel, 1817); Johann Gottlieb Perkuhn, Beschreibung eines Kriegsspiels zum Gebrauch für Militairs (Hamburg: Appel, 1817); E. F. Planner, Kriegsspiel zu angenehmen Unterhaltung für Officiere und gebildete Stände (Wien: Mörschner und Jasper, 1824). Heinrich August Pierer, Pierer’s Universal-Lexikon (Altenburg: H. A. Pierer, 1860), 9: 822–23. 93. Venturini, Darstellung, 2. 94. Georg Venturini, Lehrbuch der Militair-Geographie der östlichen Länder am Niederrhein: In Vier Bänden (Koppenhagen: bei Schubothe, 1801), x. 95. See Perla, The Art of Wargaming, 22. 96. Venturini, Beschreibung, 15. 97. Ibid., 1. 98. Ibid., 65. 99. Anon., “Hellwig’s Kriegsspiel,” Zeitung für die elegante Welt, no. 174 (October 30, 1807): 1389. 100. Johann Ferdinand Opiz, Das Opiz’sche Kriegsspiel, ein Beitrag zur Bildung künftiger und zur Unterhaltung selbst der erfahrensten Taktiker (Halle: Hendels Verlag, 1806). 101. Ibid., 14–15. Opiz uses a checkered board, but like Venturini, his son suggests in a commentary that one might make use of topographical maps: “If the players wanted to use a real geometrically based map as their board, then all they would

288

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need to do was to draw a grid with so many squares as the board contains onto the map, or they could simply place it under the grid” (48). 102. Opiz, Das Opiz’sche Kriegsspiel, 15–16, emphases in original. 103. Ibid., 77. 104. Ibid., 80–81. 105. Ibid., 78. 106. Ibid., 16–19, emphases in original. 107. For the rules regarding the attack on forts, see ibid., 96–101. 108. Ibid., 21–22. 109. Ibid., 24, emphases in original. 110. Ibid., 22–23, emphases in original. 111. Ibid., 134. 112. Anon., “Hellwig’s Kriegsspiel,” 1388. 113. Holborn, “The Prusso-German School,” 283. 114. Gerhard von Scharnhorst, Nutzen der militärischen Geschichte: Ursach ihres Mangels. Ein Fragment aus d. Scharnhorst-Nachlass (Osnabrück: BiblioVerlag, 1973), 3. 115. Ibid., 6–7. 116. Ibid., 7. 117. Ibid., 6. 118. Ibid., 4, 7. 119. Ibid., 7. 120. Berenhorst, Betrachtungen, 2: 541. 121. Scharnhorst, Nutzen, 9–10. 122. Ibid., 10. 123. Ibid., 7–8. 124. Scharnhorst, quoted in Clausewitz, Schriften, 1: 209. 125. Carl von Clausewitz, Schriften—Aufsätze—Studien—Briefe, ed. Werner Hahlweg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990), vol. 2, part 2, 675. 126. Clausewitz, Schriften, 1: 443, 449; compare Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 233. 127. Clausewitz, Schriften, vol. 2, part 1, 74. 128. Carl von Clausewitz, Verstreute kleine Schriften (Osnabrück: Biblio Verlag, 1979), 8. Hans Wilhelm Hetzler links the tact of judgment to Kant’s notion of genius because both are inborn and cannot be taught. “ ‘Bewegung im erschwerenden Mittel’: Handlungstheoretische Elemente bei Carl von Clausewitz,” in Gerhard Vowinckel, ed., Clausewitz-Kolloquium: Theorie des Krieges als Sozialwissenschaft, Beiträge zur Politischen Wissenschaft, Band 65 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1993), 45–61. While the tact of judgment, like all cognitive powers, does rely on certain innate capacities, Clausewitz regards it primarily as a skill that can be trained. 129. History therefore does not contain universal principles, only useful models. As José Fernández Vega writes, while the commander’s military reaction to a given situation “can be inspired by examples from the past, it is always specific.” José Fernández Vega, “War as ‘Art’: Aesthetics and Politics in Clausewitz’s Social Thinking,”

notes to pages 137 – 1 4 0

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in Hew Strachan and Andreas Herberg-Rothe, eds., Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 129. See also Ernst Vollrath, “ ‘Neue Wege der Klugheit’: Zum methodischen Prinzip der Theorie des Handelns bei Clausewitz,” Zeitschrift für Politik, Jahrgang 31, Heft 1, März 1984, 67. 130. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 1085. It is therefore not quite the case that the general staff came to prefer war games over texts, as Philipp von Hilgers claims (Kriegsspiele, 48). The use of texts as training devices, and in particular as devices to acquaint soldiers with friction and chance, is generally overlooked even when the necessity of an exposure to these elements of war is acknowledged. See, for example, Antulio Joseph Echevarria, Clausewitz and Contemporary War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 118. Within a Lacanian framework, Friedrich Kittler distinguishes fiction from simulation along media lines: texts produce (symbolic) fictions, whereas Reißwitz’s commode marks the transition to (imaginary) simulations (Kittler, “Fiktion und Simulation,” 73–74). This distinction, however, obscures the function of texts around 1800. It seems more useful to think of the simulation as a model of the dynamic behavior of a system. Such a definition cuts across distinct media without disregarding their important differences, and it explains better the attention all the different media give to poetics. 131. The most useful examples for the education of future officers are therefore the most recent ones, and the further back in history one goes the greater the irrelevance of the examples (Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 341). 132. Clausewitz, Verstreute, 8. 133. Carl von Clausewitz, Hinterlassene Werke (Berlin: Dümmler, 1858), 7: 34, 35. 134. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 858, emphasis in original. 135. Ibid., 337. 136. Ibid., 252. With philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith we might say that the invented examples work because they are “fictional concreta”; that is, they present imagined concrete things in which causal relations can be modeled. Peter Godfrey-Smith, “Models and Fictions in Science,” Philosophical Studies 143, no. 1 (2009): 101–16. 137. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 1085. 138. See Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit: 1. L’ intrigue et le récit historique (Paris: Seuil, 1991). 139. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 252. 140. Ibid. 141. See also ibid., 208, 658–59; Clausewitz, Verstreute, 59; Clausewitz, Schriften, 1: 101. 142. Clausewitz, Verstreute, 109. 143. Ibid., 110. 144. Hayden White, The Content of Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 1. 145. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 462, 369. 146. Clausewitz, Hinterlassene Werke, 6: 158–59. 147. Jean-Jacques Langendorff, Krieg führen: Antoine-Henri Jomini (Zürich: vdf Hochschulverlag, 2008), 300–301; Paret, Clausewitz and the State, 357–58.

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notes to pages 1 4 0 – 1 4 6

148. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 662. 149. Ibid., 371. 150. Clausewitz, Schriften, vol. 2, part 2, 655–56. 151. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 253–54. 152. Echevarria states that Clausewitz does not offer a scientific method for his analysis of war; that is, he does not explicitly outline a procedure. In this sense he is right to say that “On War is an effort to spare readers the burden of recreating the universe of war, so to speak, whenever they needed to learn about war through books” (Clausewitz and Contemporary War, 34). Yet, as Clausewitz’s example demonstrates, when readers are to understand the phenomenological experience of war, he precisely seeks to re-create the universe of war and to involve the readers directly in the process of its unfolding. 153. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 254. 154. While Gaston Bachelard’s topoanalysis in The Poetics of Space is centered on a “felicitous space” (xxxv), the house, Clausewitz’s passage on the battlefield and his general understanding of the space of war closely approximates Bachelard’s phenomenological approach and his distinction between lived space and geometrical space. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). 155. See Herfried Münkler’s commentary on Clausewitz’s account of the Battle of Borodino in Gewalt und Ordnung: Das Bild des Krieges im politischen Denken (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1992), 186. 156. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 285. 157. Ibid., 207. 158. Ibid., 1176. 159. Ibid., 1178. 160. Ibid., 1177. 161. Ibid., 1178. 162. Clausewitz, Verstreute, 117. 163. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 238. 164. Raymond Aron, Penser la guerre, Clausewitz, vol. 1: L’ âge européen (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1976), 317. 165. Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 371.

5. Paper Empires 1. Henri Marie Auguste Berthaut, Les Ingénieurs Géographes Militaires 1624– 1831 (Paris: Impr. du Ser vice géographique, 1902), 2: 262. 2. Max Eckart, Die Kartenwissenschaft (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1921), 1: 441. For similar statements see Günther Hake, Kartographie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1975–1976), 1: 13; René Siestrunck, “La Carte militaire,” in Cartes et figures de la terre (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, CCI, 1980), 370. More recently Jeremy Black has questioned the revolutionary aspect. As David Buisseret has also shown, maps were used for military and other governmental purposes in the early sixteenth century, and

notes to pages 1 47 – 1 48

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Black is therefore correct to point out that the mapping endeavors around 1800 continued patterns witnessed earlier. Yet the transformation of the art of war during the Napoleonic era made maps into a sine qua non of large-scale warfare. This vastly increased both the production and the accuracy of military maps, and it spurred the development of a number of new methods. As Matthew H. Edney states, the cartographic ideal changed from the low-resolution geographic map of the earth to the high-resolution topographical survey “almost overnight.” Jeremy Black, “A Revolution in Military Cartography? Europe 1650–1815,” Journal of Military History 73, no. 1 (2009): 49–68; David Buisseret, “Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps in France before the Accession of Louis IV,” in David Buisseret, ed., Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 99–123; Matthew H. Edney, “The Irony of Imperial Mapping,” in James R. Akerman, ed., The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 41. 3. Works of military history rarely consider the impact of cartography at the time. Martin van Creveld acknowledges the lack of research on the topic, while even a work such as Stefan Kaufmann’s that analyzes the media of warfare remains ill informed about cartography. Martin van Creveld, Command in War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 281; Stefan Kaufmann, Kommunikationstechnik und Kriegführung 1815–1945: Stufen telemedialer Rüstung (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1996). Hermann Giehrl’s older study, which is better informed on this topic, claims that the maps were generally inaccurate and thus dismisses their importance. Hermann Giehrl, Der Feldherr Napoleon als Organisator: Betrachtungen über seine Verkehrs- und Nachrichtenmittel, seine Arbeits- und Befehlweise (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1911). In lieu of a single comprehensive work, there are a few excellent studies in the history of military cartography. The best one to date is Berthaut, Les Ingénieurs géographes militaires from 1902. Recently Martin Rickenbacher has examined the Napoleonic mapping of Switzerland in Napoleons Karten der Schweiz: Landesvermessung als Machtfaktor 1798–1815 (Baden: Hier Jetzt, 2011). In addition to numerous articles on local and regional matters, among the works of somewhat larger scope see Anne Godlewska, The Napoleonic Survey of Egypt: A Masterpiece of Cartographic Compilation, Cartographica, vol. 25 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988); Anne Godlewska, Geography Unbound: French Geographic Science from Cassini to Humboldt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Chenxi Tang, The Geographic Imagination of Modernity: Geography, Literature, and Philosophy in German Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 4. Godlewska, Geography Unbound, 129. 5. See Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” in Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 194–229); Joseph Vogl, “Becoming-Media: Galileo’s Telescope,” Grey Room 29 (Winter 2008): 14–25. 6. Berthaut, Les Ingénieurs, 1: 172. 7. The only surviving copy of a road map from the Roman Empire, the Tabula Peutingeriana, is highly schematic and of such a small scale that it can only have served

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notes to pages 1 48 – 151

as an auxiliary aid to local spatial orientation. See O. A. W. Dilke, “Itineraries and Geographical Maps in the Early and Late Roman Empires,” in J. B. Harley and David Woodward, eds., The History of Cartography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 1: 234–57. 8. Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, Epitoma Rei Militaris, American University Studies, Series 17, Classical Languages and Literature, vol. 11 (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 139. 9. Niccolò Machiavelli, Art of War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 111. 10. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2005), vol. 2, book 3, 173–75. 11. Mémorial topographique et militaire, rédigé au dépôt général de la guerre (Paris: L’imprimerie de la république, 1803), 3: 77. 12. Pierre Alexandre Joseph Allent, “Essai sur les reconnaissances militaires in Mémorial topographique,” in Mémorial, 4: 27. See also Édouard Rouby, La Cartographie au Dépôt de la guerre: Notice historique et descriptive sur les publications du Dépôt de la guerre (Paris: Librarie Militaire de J. Dumaine, 1867). 13. Josef Konvitz, Cartography in France, 1660–1848: Science, Engineering, and Statecraft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 2. 14. See Monique Pelletier, La carte de Cassini: L’extraordinaire aventure de la carte de France (Paris: Presses de l’Ecole nationale des ponts et chaussées, 1990); Francesco Frasca, Cartografia Napoleonica (Lulu, 2008). 15. Konvitz, Cartography in France, 16. 16. The development also involved a number of new methods of projection. Leading mathematicians such as Euler, Lambert, and Gauss were all involved in these developments. See Tang, The Geographic Imagination of Modernity, 133; Leo Bagrow, A History of Russian Cartography up to 1800, ed. Henry W. Castner (Wolfe Island, Ontario: Walker Press, 1975), 2: 182. 17. See Sven Widmalm, “Accuracy, Rhetoric, and Technology: The ParisGreenwich Triangulation, 1784–88,” in Tore Frängsmyr, J. L. Heilbron, and Robin E. Rider, eds., The Quantifying Spirit of the 18th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 179–206. The Cassini maps themselves, however, were of limited use for military purposes. Their depiction of altitude was insufficient, and they were at too small a scale to provide the kind of detailed topographical information needed for military maneuvers. See Monique Pelletier, “Cartography and Power in France During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Cartographica 35, nos. 3–4 (1998): 49. 18. Monique Pelletier, “La Carte de Cassini à l’époque révolutionnaire,” in Cartes, Cartographes et Géographes: Actes du 114e congrès national des sociétés savantes (Paris: Editions du CTHS, 1990), 19. 19. Calon quoted in Berthaut, Les Ingénieurs, 1: 163. For the campaign of 1806 in Saxony, Napoleon was only in possession of the dated Petri map (1759–1763). The lack of detail and the poor indications of the terrain led to a number of operational diffi-

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culties. See Colonel Jean-Baptiste Vachée, Napoléon en campagne (Paris: Nancy BergerLevrault, 1913), 47, 214–15. 20. Mémorial, 2: 41. 21. Military cartography here follows the general trend toward centralization and uniformity during the empire. See Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, “Décrire, Compter, Calculer: The Debate over Statistics during the Napoleonic Period,” in Lorenz Krüger, Lorraine J. Daston, and Michael Heidelberger, eds., The Probabilistic Revolution, vol. 1: Ideas in History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 305–16. 22. Mémorial, 3: 117. 23. Ibid., 3: xx–xxi. 24. Agathon-Jean-François Fain, Mémoires du Baron Fain (Paris: Arléa, 2001), xvi. 25. Ibid., 29. 26. See, for example, Hake, Kartographie, 2: 276; Max Seeberger, Wie Bayern Vermessen Wurde (Augsburg: Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte, 2001), 16; Frasca, Cartografia Napoleonica, 54. 27. Mémorial, 2: 187. The quotation is from Catherine Delano-Smith, “Signs on Printed Topographical Maps, ca. 1470–ca. 1640,” in Harley and Woodward, eds., The History of Cartography, vol. 3.1, 532. 28. Berthaut, Les Ingénieurs, 2: 44. 29. Johann Ludwig Vitzthum von Eckstädt, Rassuzhdenie o sochinenii voennykh planov, v pol’zu molodykh ofitserov (St. Petersburg, 1801), 21. Also in Prussia the wars led to an emphasis on the practical aspects at the expense of aesthetics and precision. The Immediatbericht der Militär-Reorganisationskommission in Königsberg from July 30, 1808, lists a series of skills required for officers in the field, among them the “drawing of large-scale maps and sketches, correctly and intelligibly without great beauty.” See Rudolf Vaupel, ed., Die Reorganisation des Preußischen Staates unter Stein und Hardenberg, Zweiter Teil: Das Preußische Heer vom Tilsiter Frieden bis zur Befreiung 1807– 1814 (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1938), 535–36. 30. Freiherr von Odeleben, Napoleons Feldzug in Sachsen im Jahr 1813 (Dresden, 1816), 144–45. 31. Ibid., 153. 32. See also Ronald Pawly, Napoleon’s Imperial Headquarters, vol. 1: Organization and Personnel (Oxford: Osprey, 2004), 11. 33. A notice in the New York Times on May 12, 1879, states that one of the map institutions in St. Petersburg wishes to sell the printing press for 1,000 rubles. See also Giehrl, Der Feldherr Napoleon als Organisator, 100. As a cartographer, d’Albe would occasionally despair at the fate of his fragile maps: “These damned campaigns are the destroyers of maps; one goes into the sack of the aide-de-camp, another goes into the chest pocket of the equerry, and they are folded, unfolded, torn, exposed to the rain, to the wind, to fire, to wax candles etc. There are times when I truly have good reason to spew forth my geographic bile!” Quoted in Marc Troude, Le Baron Bacler d’Albe (Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise: Pierre Dubois, 1954), 50.

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notes to pages 157 – 16 3

34. Fain, Mémoires, 29. See also G. G. Bredow and Carl Venturini, Chronik des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, vol. 2: 1804–1805 (Altona, 1806), 1041; Vachée, Napoléon en campagne, 66. 35. Louis François Lejeune, Mémoires du général Lejeune (Paris, 1895), 1: 259. 36. Charles Sanders Peirce, “Virtual,” in James Mark Baldwin, ed., Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (New York: Macmillan, 1902), 763. 37. Frédéric Masson is therefore quite right to speak of Bacler d’Albe as the “réalisateur de la carte.” Frédéric Masson, Napoléon chez lui: La journée de l’Empereur aux Tuileries (Paris: Ollendorff, 1902), 167. 38. Wolgang Schäffner, “Das Ei des Brunelleschi: Projekte, Fiktionen und die Erfindung des Neuen,” in Daniel Wiedner, ed., Figuren des Europäischen: Kulturgeschichtliche Perspektiven (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2006), 56. 39. Berthaut, Les Ingénieurs, 2: 267. 40. Antoine-Henri Jomini, Précis politique et militaire des campagnes de 1812 à 1814: Extrait des souvenirs inédits du général Jomini publiés par F. Lecomte (1886; Genève: Slatkine-Magariotis, 1975), 1: 89. 41. See the critical evaluations by Jomini’s first biographers in Jean-Jacques Langendorf, Krieg führen: Antoine-Henri Jomini (Zürich: vdf Hochschulverlag, 2008), 21. 42. Antoine-Henri Jomini, Vie Politique et Militaire de Napoleon, racontée par lui-même, au tribunal de César, d’Alexandre et de Frédéric (Paris: Anselin, 1827), 4: 424. 43. Antoine-Henri Jomini, Précis de l’art de la guerre ou nouveau tableau analytique des principales combinaisons de la stratégie, de la grande tactique et de la politique militaire (1855; Osnabrück: Biblio Verlag, 1973), 1: 155. See also Antoine-Henri Jomini, Tabelau analytique des principales combinaisons de la guerre (St. Petersburg: Bellizard, Libraires de la Cour, 1830), 50. 44. Antoine-Henri Jomini, Traité des grandes opérations militaires (Paris: Magimel, 1811–1816) 285–86. 45. Jomini, Précis de l’art de la guerre, 1: 160. 46. Ibid. See also article 21  in the same volume, “Des zones et des lignes d’opérations.” 47. Listing the reasons for the disastrous retreat in Russia, Jomini states, “No. 11 We did not know the country well; the existing maps were detestable” (Vie Politique, 4: 212). 48. See also his essay “L’art de la Guerre,” in Rühle von Lilienstern, ed., Pallas: Eine Zeitschrift für Staats- und Kriegskunst (Tübingen: bei J. G. Cotta, 1808), 1: 31–41. 49. Correspondance de Napoléon Ier (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1868), 26: 106. See also Langendorf, Krieg führen, 56–65. 50. Johann Christopher von Textor, quoted in Oskar Albrecht, Militärisches Vermessungs- und Kartenwesen Preußens (Euskirchen: Leiter Militärisches Geowesen, 2001), 81. 51. Johann Georg Lehmann, Die Lehre der Situation-Zeichnung oder Anweisung zum richtigen Erkennen und genauen Abbilden der Erd-Oberfläche in topographischen Charten und Situations-Planen, 1. Teil (Dresden, 1816), 46. Some years later another

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Prussian topographer, Ernst Heinrich Michaelis, advocated the need for a topographical “critique” of both a scientific and an artistic nature, namely the continued practice of calibrating the difficult application of theoretical rules in specific cases. See Ernst Heinrich Michaelis, Einige durch die Fortsetzung der Bohnenberger-Ammonschen Karte von Schwaben veranlaßte Bemerkungen über die topographische Kunst (Bern, 1825), 130–31. 52. Johann Georg Lehmann, Darstellung einer neuen Theorie der Bezeichnung der schiefen Flächen im Grundriß oder der Situationszeichnung der Berge (Leipzig, 1799), 151. 53. Lehmann, Lehre, 44. The impact of Lehmann’s writings can be mea sured by that fact that he would later be plagiarized by the British topographical engineer William Siborne. In 1827 Siborne copied this map without attribution in A practical treatise on topographical surveying and drawing (London: C. and J. Rivington, 1827). Here the Gegend um Ober-Wiesenberg simply becomes a Topographical Plan and Map of a Mountainous and Rocky Country—drawn by Lieutenant Siborne (plate 5). 54. Lehmann, Lehre, 41. 55. Ibid., 30. 56. Ibid., 41. See also Tang, The Geographic Imagination of Modernity, 136–38. Tang reads Lehmann’s linkage of military cartography and the terrain as an example of the development of a subjective relation to geography around 1800 that manifests itself in the “dynamic unity of man and earth” (3). In the military discourse of the time, the subjective interaction with the surroundings is also a central aspect. In the tactical and strategic perspective that governs military thought, however, the cartographic interaction with the terrain is not an end in itself, a way of feeling at home in the world, but merely an expedient to the military end of vanquishing the enemy. 57. Jomini’s Précis de la guerre was first published in 1838; in a later edition he added a brief essay concerning the development of “un bon coup d’oeil stratégique.” The various exercises that make up the training are to be performed “on the map” (2: 359). 58. Lehmann, Lehre, 41. 59. Allent, “Essai sur les reconnaissances militaires,” 4: 106. 60. Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege (Bonn: Dümmler, 1980), 247–48. 61. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 5: 313. 62. Allent, “Essais sur les reconnaissances militaires,” 106. 63. Ibid., 35. 64. Ibid., 46. 65. Franco Farinelli, “Von der Natur der Moderne: Eine Kritik der kartographischen Vernunft,” in Dagmar Reichert, ed., Räumliches Denken (Zürich: VDH, 1996), 267–303. 66. Kant, quoted in Farinelli, “Von der Natur,” 280–81. 67. Ibid., 282. 68. Berenhorst admonishes, “Believe me, only few of you have the skill with which the imagination draws maps, like the overview of migratory birds that human beings

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can only obtain with their minds.” Georg Heinrich von Berenhorst, Betrachtungen über die Kriegskunst, über ihre Fortschritte, ihre Widersprüche und ihre Zuverlässigkeit (Osnabrück: Biblio Verlag, 1978), 2: 345. 69. Kaufmann, Kommunikationstechnik und Kriegführung, 26. 70. Fedor Fedorovich Shubert, Zapiski Voenno-topograficheskogo depo, vol. 1 (Sankt Peterburg: V tip. Ekspeditsii zagotovleniia Gosudarstvennykh bumag, 1837), 5–7. 71. Ibid., 18. For the institutionalization of cartography in Russia, see also Fyodor A. Shibanov, Studies in the History of Russian Cartography, vol. 2 (Toronto: B. V. Gutsell, 1975). 72. Albrecht, Militärisches Vermessungs- und Kartenwesen Preußens, 83. 73. Otto August Rühle von Lilienstern, Bericht eines Augenzeugen, von dem Feldzuge der während den Monaten September und October 1806 unter dem Kommando des Fürsten zu Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen gestandenen Königl. preußischen und Kurfürstl. sächsischen Truppen (Tübingen: Cotta, 1809), vi. Rühle’s wish eventually came true. During the occupation of France in 1815 topographical bureaus were established in each of the Prussian corps, and topographical material was further exchanged between the allied Prussian and Russian armies. Ludwig von Reiche, Memoiren des königlich preußischen Generals der Infanterie Ludwig von Reiche: Herausgegeben von seinem Neffen Louis von Weltzien (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1857), 2: 345. 74. See Martin Rickenbacher, “Französische Kartierungen von Schweizer Gebieten zwischen 1760 und 1815,” Cartographica Helvetica 41 (2010): 12. 75. In similar fashion Bacler d’Albe was robbed of his topographical materials by the Austrians in 1799. See Troude, Le Baron Bacler d’Albe, 18. The value of such military maps can be assessed by the adventurous evacuation of a part of the collection in the Plankammer in Potsdam. In 1806, as the French forces were approaching, Inspector Reymann had them packed down and sailed via Pillau to Königberg, where they remained in security until 1815. See Albrecht, Militärisches Vermessungs- und Kartenwesen Preußens, 54. In Portugal the fleeing royal family had taken most of the country’s cartographic material with them to Brazil, but the remains were immediately seized by the French army when it invaded Lisbon in 1807. See Richard H. P. Smith, “Peninsular War Cartography: A New Look at the Military Mapping of General Sir George Murray and the Quartermaster General’s Department,” Imago Mundi 65, no. 2 (2013): 234. 76. In 1815 a number of the three-dimensional models, the plans-reliefs, were similarly seized and taken to Berlin. They were eventually destroyed during the bombardments in 1945. See Antoine Roux, Nicolas Faucherre, and Guillaume Monsaingeon, Les plans en relief des places du roy (Paris: Éditions Adam Biro, 1989), 154. 77. Berthaut, Les Ingénieurs, 2: 391. 78. George Frédéric de Martens, Nouveau Recueil de Traités 1814–15 (Göttingen, 1818), 2: 12. See also George Frédéric de Martens, Supplément au Receuil des Principaux Traités (Göttingen, 1808), 4: 217, 450; George Frédéric de Martens, Nouveau Recueil de Traités 1808–1819 (Göttingen, 1880), 4: 153, 627. For a similar procedure in Italy see Frasca, Cartografia Napoleonica, 56.

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79. Allent, “Essai sur les reconnaissances militaires,” in Mémorial, 4: 28. As Matthew H. Edney has shown in the case of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, the technological and epistemological ideal offered by triangulation was impossible in practice. Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 80. While military cartography has in general received little attention, this is especially the case for reconnaissances. Anne Godlewska, Marcus R. Létourneau, and Paul Schauerte have described the landscape panoramas drawn between 1802 and 1809 by Giuseppe Bagetti, who served in the French Army as a topographer and officer. These sketches, however, had no tactical or strategic value. They were part of Napoleonic propaganda and should depict the ideology of his heroic victory. See Anne Godlewska, Marcus R. Létourneau, and Paul Schauerte, “Maps, Painting and Lies: Portraying Napoleon’s Battlefields in Northern Italy,” Imago Mundi 57 (2005): 150. Without analyzing them in detail, Yolande Hodson notes the importance of military sketches for Prince William, Duke of Cumberland, particularly during the Seven Years’ War. See Yolande Hodson, “Prince William, Royal Map Collector,” Map Collector 44 (Autumn 1988): 2–12. For a recent article on the maps produced and used by the British Army during the war with Napoleon in Iberia in 1808–1814, see Smith, “Peninsular War Cartography.” 81. Siborne, A practical treatise on topographical surveying and drawing, xvi. 82. Karl von Decker, Ansichten über die Kriegführung im Geiste der Zeit (Berlin, Ernst Siegfried Mittler, 1817), 23. 83. Anne Godlewska’s online Atlas of Napoleonic Cartography in Italy features further sketches and also several sketch books of Italy held at the Archives de la guerre (SHAT) in Vincennes. Available at http://www.geog.queensu.ca/napoleonatlas. 84. Ferdinand Heinrich August von Larisch, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Kartenabteilung, V 31167. I owe a warm thanks to Dr. Markus Heinz for pointing my attention to this collection of sketches. 85. August von Larisch, “Entwurf zur Bearbeitung einer Charte des Kriegsschauplatzes des 7ten Armeekorps,” Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Kartenabteilung, V 31167. 86. August von Larisch, Oberst von Larisch, Ein Zeit- und Lebensbild (Dresden: Wilhelm Baensch Verlagshandlung, 1888), 3–4. Th is work was published by a descendant of the Saxon topographer. 87. Larisch, Oberst von Larisch, 70–71. 88. Otto August Rühle von Lilienstern, Handbuch—Erste Abteilung (Berlin: Reimer, 1817), 5. 89. This gradual production of maps while marching is also described in the memoirs of General Funck. He mentions that the sketches had a secondary purpose: because the terrain in this region was particularly difficult to navigate, General Reynier had ordered that every division should march on its own and map all the minor roads, so that he would have the greatest number of options available for the retreat. Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand von Funck, Erinnerungen aus dem Feldzuge des Sächsischen Corps unter dem General Grafen Reynier im Jahr 1812 aus den Papieren des verstorbenen Generallieutenants von Funck (Dresden, 1829), 94.

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90. Of course such conditions are not exclusive to the Napoleonic Wars. Already in 1588 Edmund Yorke, expecting an imminent Spanish invasion, wrote the following comment on a sketch of military defenses in Norfolk: “Reason would a scall but tyme permits not” (Hatfield House CPM II.36, Hatfield House Maps, 31, 52, no. 54), quoted in Peter Barber, “England II: Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps, 1550– 1625” in Buisseret, Monarchs, Ministers and Maps, 88. See also Edward Lynam, British Maps and Mapmakers (London: William Collins, 1944), 22. 91. M. M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 84. 92. The chronotope is a multifaceted concept with several subdivisions, but the main kinds Bakhtin analyzes are, first, individual motifs such as the road or a meeting and, second, what we might call genre-chronotopes, that is, the overall spatiotemporal structure inherent in a certain genre or subgenre, for example the “bucolicpastoral-idyllic chronotope” (ibid., 103). 93. Bakthin’s references to both Lessing’s Laocoön and Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms indicate the wide applicability of the concept (ibid., 251). 94. Ibid., 85. 95. From a historical perspective, this is the topic of Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton’s fascinating book, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010). 96. The 7th Army corps operated on the right flank of the main force. It therefore did not participate in the fight for Moscow but had advanced only as far as Belarus when the retreat commenced. See Roman Töppel, Die Sachsen und Napoleon: Ein Stimmungsbild 1806–1813 (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2008), 274. 97. Louis Marin, “Les voies de la carte,” in Cartes et figures de la terre (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, CCI, 1980), 50. 98. Larisch, Oberst von Larisch, 63. 99. Ibid., 246. 100. There is some confusion as to the dating of this map. August von Larisch claimed that it had taken several years of scrupulous work for his ancestor to finish the map (ibid., 246). On the actual map, however, the mapmaker himself left a signature and date that seem to belie this statement: “Entworfen 1831. von dem Hauptmann von Larisch, aus seinen Papieren als, Quartiermachender Officier des Regiments [Drawn in 1831. by Captain von Larisch, from his papers as, Quartermaster Officer in the Regiment].” See August von Larisch, Marsch-Quartiere des Königlich Sächsischen Infanterie-Regiments Prinz Friedrich August, 27. März bis 12. Mai 1812, Sächsisches Staatsarchiv, Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden, 11373 Kartensammlung des Sächsischen Kriegsarchivs Fach 5, No. 49. 101. Larisch, Marsch-Quartiere. Given its unusual measurements it is not possible to reproduce the map here. 102. Ibid. 103. Berthaut, Les Ingénieurs, 1: 202. 104. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press 1994), 150.

notes to pages 17 9 – 18 5

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105. For the link between science and political power as a function of cartographic representation see Louis Marin, “Les Voies de la carte,” especially 50–54. 106. Louis-Alexandre Berthier, Relation de la Bataille de Marengo (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1805), 39. 107. Ibid., 47. 108. Ibid., 29. 109. An indicator of the growing public awareness of maps is the publication on July 17, 1809, of the fi rst map in the London Times. It depicted the positions of the  French and Austrian troops at the Battle of Aspern and Essling. See Michael Heffernan, “The Cartography of the Fourth Estate: Mapping the New Imperialism in British and French Newspapers, 1875–1925,” in Akerman, Th e Imperial Map, 261–99, 346. 110. The classic study is Arthur H. Robinson, Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 111. François de Dainville and Jean Tulard, Atlas administratif de l’Empire Français, d’après l’atlas rédígé par ordre du Duc de Feltre en 1812 (Genève: Librairie Droz, 1973), 10. 112. Ibid., 2; Fain, Mémoires, 65–66.

6. The Poetics of War 1. Leo Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 11: Voina i mir, ed. V. G. Chertkova (Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1932), 56. 2. In the past few years the complex relations between literature and cartography have attracted growing attention. Much of this work has focused on the early modern period. See in particular the following works by Tom Conley: The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992); The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); An Errant Eye: Poetry and Topography in Renaissance France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). See also Jörg Dünne, Die kartographische Imagination: Erinnern, Erzählen und Fingieren in der Frühen Neuzeit (Paderborn: Fink, Wilhelm, 2011); Ricardo Padrón, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); the section devoted to literature in the third volume of David Woodward, ed., The History of Cartography—Cartography in the European Renaissance (Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 2007), especially the essays by Tom Conley, Henry S. Turner, Nancy Bouzrara, Franz Reitinger, Theodore J. Cachey Jr., Neil Safier, Ilda Mendes dos Santos, and Simone Pinet. Work on later periods have focused on colonialism, such as John Noyes, Colonial Space: Spatiality in the Discourse of German South West Africa 1884–1915 (Philadelphia: Harwood Academic, 1992), while more theoretical approaches inform Louis Marin, Utopiques: Jeux d’espaces (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1973); Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998); Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York:

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Verso, 2002); Robert Stockhammer, Die Kartierung der Erde: Macht und Lust in Karten und Literatur (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2007). Drawing on these works this chapter moves into as yet unexplored territory as I examine how the realist novel in the nineteenth century variously appropriated, refashioned, and reflected critically on the military maps that had emerged out of the cartographic apparatus installed around 1800. 3. Honoré de Balzac, Pensées, sujets, fragmens, ed. Jacques Crepet (Paris: A. Blaizot, 1910), 76. 4. Tetsuo Takayama, Les oeuvres romanesques avortées de Balzac (1829–1842) (Tokyo: Keio Institute of Cultural and Linguistic Studies, 1966), 11. 5. Under the heading Scènes de la vie militaire, Balzac lists a number of titles, for example Le Combat. Few of them were realized. Balzac, Pensées, 115, 137–38. 6. See Honoré de Balzac, Correspondance, éd. Roger Pierrot (Paris: Éditions Garnier frères, 1960–), vol. 2. 7. Ibid., 2: 155. 8. Balzac, Pensées, 99. 9. Balzac, quoted in Thierry Bodin, “Les batailles napoléoniennes de Balzac,” in Paul Noirot and Dominique Feintrenie, eds., Napoléon de l’ histoire à la légende (Paris: Editions In Forma, 2000), 91. 10. Balzac, quoted in Bodin, “Les batailles napoléoniennes de Balzac,” 107. 11. Balzac, La Comédie humaine, ed. Pierre-Georges Castex (Paris: Gallimard 1976), 1: 1150. 12. Ibid., 12: 653. 13. Bernard Guyon, La Création littérarie chez Balzac: La genèse du Médecin de Campagne (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1951), 31. See also Bodin, “Les batailles napoléoniennes de Balzac”; Marcel Bouteron, “Le Capitaine Périolas et La Bataille,” Etudes balzaciennes (Paris: Jouve, 1954). 14. Patrick Berthier, “Absence et présence du récit guerrier dans l’oeuvre de Balzac,” in L’Année Balzacienne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984), 239. 15. Takayama, Les oeuvres romanesques avortées de Balzac, 131–32. 16. Balzac, La Comédie humaine, 1: 626. 17. György Lukács, Studies in European Realism (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), 151–52. 18. This point is also made in The Historical Novel with Tolstoy as the preeminent example. György Lukács, The Historical Novel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 43. 19. Balzac, Pensées, 76. 20. Takayama, Les oeuvres romanesques avortées de Balzac, 4. 21. Balzac, quoted in Bodin, “Les batailles napoléoniennes de Balzac,” 91, emphasis added. 22. Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions (New York: Viking, 1998), 325. 23. Lukács, Studies in European Realism, 151. 24. Torquato Tasso, The Liberation of Jerusalem, trans. Max Wickert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 215. For a discussion of the close links between the de-

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velopment of military technology and the representation of war in Ludovico Ariosto’s earlier epic Orlando Furioso, see Matteo Valleriani, “The War in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso: A Snapshot of the Passage from Medieval to Early Modern Technology,” in Marco Formisano and Hartmut Böhme, eds., War in Words: Transformations of War from Antiquity to Clausewitz (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), 375–90. 25. Lukács, The Historical Novel, 83. 26. Balzac, quoted in Bodin, “Les batailles napoléoniennes de Balzac,” 91. 27. Honoré de Balzac, Écrits sur le roman (Paris: Librarie Générale Française, 2000), 172. 28. Honoré de Balzac, Le Colonel Chabert, El Verdugo, Adieu, Le Réquisitionnaire (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1974), 203. 29. Ibid., 204. 30. Ibid., 205. 31. Samuel Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London: J. M. Dent, 1975), 169. 32. Balzac, Le Colonel Chabert, 207. The scientific pretensions of the text are emphasized by the epigraph that was added to the edition of 1835: “The most hardy physiologists are alarmed by the physical results of this psychological phenomenon, which, however, is merely an inner stroke of lightning, and, as with all electrical effects, it appears bizarre and capricious in its various forms” (287). 33. Ibid., 207. 34. See Rachel Shuh, “Madness and Military History in Balzac’s ‘Adieu,’ ” French Forum 26, no. 1 (2001): 42–43. 35. Balzac, Le Colonel Chabert, 196, 198. 36. Ibid., 204. 37. Christian Gottlieb Hölder, Meine Reise über den Gotthard nach den Borromäischen Inseln und Mailand; und von da zurück über das Val Formozza, die Grimsel und das Oberland im Sommer 1801, Zweiter Teil (Stuttgart, 1804), 174. For the identification of Kleist as the author of the sketch, see 77a and 77aa in Heinrich von Kleists Lebensspuren: Dokumente und Berichte der Zeitgenossen, ed. Helmut Sembdner, (München: Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996), 67–70; Hermann Weiss, Funde und Studien zu Heinrich von Kleist (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1984), 47–57; Hilda Brown, “Kleists Theorie der Tragödie—im Licht neuer Funde,” in Heinrich von Kleist: Studien zu Werk und Wirkung (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1988), 117–32. 38. Kleist, Lebensspuren, 69. 39. Ibid., 70. 40. Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001), 2: 770. 41. Otto August Rühle von Lilienstern, Handbuch für den Offizier zur Belehrung im Frieden und zum Gebrauch im Felde (Berlin: Reimer, 1817), 70. 42. Balzac, La Comédie humaine, 12: 318. Writing to Périolas, from whom he requested historical and cartographical material on the battles on the Lobau in 1809, Balzac further remarked on his condition as a writer, “My life is constantly like that of the army in Italy minus Napoleon. I fight, I shed rivers of ink, I work during the

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night, I eat bread soaked in brains and I see nothing of Leoben” (Correspondance, 3: 643). See also Berthier, “Absence et présence du récit guerrier dans l’oeuvre de Balzac,” 244. 43. Ian Baucom, “The Disasters of War: On Inimical Life,” Polygraph 18 (2006): 177. Baucom’s insightful article, whose broad conception of realism also includes Goya, shows how the emergence of the type of the unjust enemy, what he calls “inimical life,” comes to occupy the center of the realist tradition. More than serving as a catalyst for the representation of a new type of enemy, however, the wars had a profound impact on representation itself, on poetics. The notion of the “moving center” is based on Lukács, Studies in European Realism, 145. 44. Balzac, Écrits sur le roman, 137. 45. Ibid., 171. 46. Ibid., 172. 47. Ibid., 171–73. 48. Balzac, Correspondance, 3: 583–84. 49. See, for example, Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966); Gottfried Schwarz, Krieg und Roman: Untersuchungen zu Stendhal, Hugo, Tolstoj, Zola und Simon (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992); Manuel Köppen, Das Entsetzen des Beobachters: Krieg und Medien im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2005); Margherita Leoni, “Vertiges de la sensation: Le spectacle impossible de Waterloo,” in Stendhal, la chartreuse de Parme, ou, la “chimère absente” (Paris: Sedes, 1996), 115–25; Michel Arrous, “Stendhal, Napoléon et l’Italie,” in Noirot and Feintrenie, Napoléon de l’ histoire à la légende, 59–75; Philippe Berthier, Stendhal: Vivre, Écrire, Aimer (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 2010); Jan Mieszkowski, Watching War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 75. 50. Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme, ed. Mariella Di Maio (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2003), 77. 51. Richard J. Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 5. 52. See Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of Literature (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973); Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 53. Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality. Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 133–34. 54. See also Marie-Laure Ryan’s more recent book, Avatars of Story (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 188–89. 55. Movement, Elaine Scarry argues, further enhances the reader’s inclination to create mental imagery, that is, to picture the world conjured by the text. See Dreaming by the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

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56. I owe a warm thanks to Frédéric Duprez for his help in procuring this document and for the permission to use it. 57. Stendhal, Chartreuse, ed. Mariella Di Maio, 88, 90. 58. Ibid., 90, 91. 59. Ibid., 90. 60. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 93, 117. 61. Stendhal, Chartreuse, ed. Mariella Di Maio, 89. 62. Ibid., 59. In a similar fashion he learns to read by studying the legends on various engravings of the battles won by Napoleon (146). 63. For a list of currently accepted senses in addition to the conventional five see David Howes, The Sixth Sense Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2009), 24. 64. Stendhal, Vie de Henry Brulard (Grenoble: Editions Glénat, 1988), 340. 65. Levin, The Gates of Horn, 137. 66. See, for example, Berthier, Stendhal, 437. 67. “Notre héros était ce matin-là du plus beau sang-froid du monde; la quantité de sang qu’il avait perdue l’avait délivré de toute la partie romanesque de son caractère” (Stendhal, Chartreuse, ed. Mariella Di Maio, 127). 68. Balzac, Écrits sur le roman, 263–64. 69. Levin, The Gates of Horn, 93. 70. See Stendhal, Chartreuse, ed. Mariella Di Maio, 92. 71. Ibid., 95–96. The historical record supports Stendhal’s description of minimal visibility. In subsequent accounts of the battle, soldiers stated that “smoke hung so thick about, that, although not more than eighty yards asunder, we could only distinguish each other by the flashes of the pieces.” And “we every instant expecting through the smoke to see the Enemy appearing under our noses, for the smoke was literally so thick that we could not see ten yards off.” Quoted in Rory Muir, Tactics and the Experience of Battle in the Age of Napoleon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 24. See also H. T. Siborne, Waterloo Letters: A Selection from Original and hitherto Unpublished Letters bearing on the Operations of the 16th, 17th, and 18th June, 1815, By Officers who served in the Campaign (London: Cassel, 1891). Numerous officers mention that dense smoke obscured most of their vision: see, for example, 100, 240. 72. Stendhal, Chartreuse, ed. Mariella Di Maio, 100. 73. Ferdinand Heinrich August von Larisch, Oberst von Larisch, Ein Zeit- und Lebensbild (Dresden, 1888), 33. 74. Stendhal, Napoléon, vol. 2: Mémoires sur Napoléon, ed. Louis Royer (Paris: H. Champion, 1929), 213ff, 208. 75. Ibid., 2: 208. 76. Ibid., 2: 215. 77. Ibid., 2: 208. The deviation from Jomini is evident in their evaluation of Maréchal Ney. When Stendhal’s Ney felt the pressure of time he “became a volcano of reasonable and firm ideas; otherwise he spoke little and poorly, and he even seemed rather timid” (2: 208). Jomini characterizes Ney in a similar fashion, but as a foil for

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his ineptitude for the new cartographic management of war, of which Jomini was the primary proponent. Antoine-Henri Jomini, Vie politique et militaire de Napoleon, racontée par lui-même, au tribunal de César, d’Alexandre et de Frédéric (Paris: Anselin, 1827), 4: 424. 78. Stendhal, Napoléon, 2: 209. 79. He writes, “You have to invent something reasonable in two minutes and often in the midst of screams and emotions” (ibid., 2: 208). 80. Ibid., 2: 193. 81. Stendhal, Chartreuse, ed. Mariella Di Maio, 677. 82. Stendhal, Vie de Henry Brulard, 340. 83. For the productive potential of the connection between birth and contingency, see David Wellbery’s excellent essay “Der Zufall der Geburt: Sternes Poetik der Kontingenz,” in Gerhart von Graevenitz and Odo Marquard, eds., Kontingenz (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1998), 291–317. 84. Stendhal, Chartreuse, ed. Mariella Di Maio, 96, 131. 85. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2001), 113–14. 86. Jan Mieszkowski, “Watching War,” PMLA 124, no. 5 (2009): 1658; Mieszkowski, Watching War, 79–80. 87. As John Keegan points out, the battle as a whole is best comprehended if we attempt to see it as a collection of differential views, that is, “by attempting to see how [the Duke of Wellington’s] differed from his soldiers’, how theirs differed one from another’s, the cavalryman’s from the gunner’s, the man’s in the rear rank of a square from the skirmisher’s to his front, the wounded man’s from that of the man left untouched.” The Face of Battle (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1988), 115. 88. William Siborne, The Waterloo Campaign 1815 (Birmingham, UK: Turnbull and Spears, 1894), 14. 89. William Siborne, Instructions for Civil and Military Surveyors in Topographical Plan-Drawing (London: G. and W. B. Whittaker, 1822); William Siborne, A practical treatise on topographical surveying and drawing (London: C. and J. Rivington, 1827). 90. Keegan, The Face of Battle, 106. 91. Siborne, Waterloo Letters, 12, 16. 92. Ibid., 351. 93. Thomas Barbington Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James II (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1849), 1: 482. See also Keegan, Th e Face of Battle, 103. 94. Gérard Genette, Figures II (Paris: Éditions du seuil, 1969), 168. In a similar vein, for Louis Marin the sketches constitute “another kind of graphics, where the same descriptive categories nevertheless apply.” “Dessins et gravures dans les manuscrits de la Vie de Henry Brulard,” in Stendhal: Écritures du romantisme I (Saint-Denis: Presse Universitaires de Vincennes, 1988), 110. 95. Stendhal, Vie de Henry Brulard, 122. 96. Ibid., 109.

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97. Ibid., 362. 98. Taking Madame de Scudéry’s map Carte du pays de Tendre from 1654 as her point of departure, Giuliana Bruno has explored the relation between emotion, movement, and cartography in Atlas of Emotion. While Stendhal goes unmentioned, the Vie de Henry Brulard is evidently the work of an affective topographer. Unlike Scudéry’s map, however, Stendhal’s sketches are for the most part static, frozen representations of the past that require a narrative supplement to bring them to life and to organize them as stages in the autobiographical itinerary. 99. Stendhal, Vie de Henry Brulard, 127. 100. Ibid., 60. 101. Ibid., 28. 102. Genette, Figures II, 175; Jacques Neefs, “Stendhal, sans fins,” in Louis Hay, ed., Le Manuscrit inachevé: Écriture, creátion, communication (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1986), 17–18. 103. See the original map reproduced in Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme, ed. Henri Martineau (Paris: Garnier, 1961). 104. See for example Vie de Henry Brulard, 54, 133, 295. 105. The Mariella Di Maio edition that I usually refer to reprints the map in the notes on page 712. 106. Stendhal, Chartreuse, ed. Mariella Di Maio, 102. 107. The insertion of the rectangular box in the Crouzet edition changes the map fundamentally. Framed, the map no longer displays the fluidity of space and the surrounding field of potentiality that is key to Stendhal’s conception of the state of war. See Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme, ed. Michel Crouzet (Orléans: Paradigme, 2007). 108. Stendhal, Chartreuse, ed. Mariella Di Maio, 102. 109. Stendhal, Correspondance, eds. Henri Martineau and Victor Del Litto (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 3: 393. Jacques Neefs also mentions the following note on the art of writing novels: C V 25 May 1840. The art of composing novels. I do not make any plans. When I have done so, I have been put off by the following mechanism: as I was writing the novel, I was trying to recall things I had thought about while writing the plan, and then the work of memory extinguished my imagination. My terrible memory is full of distraction. (quoted in Neefs, “Stendhal, sans fins,” 20) 110. Stendhal, Romans et nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 1371. 111. Stendhal in a marginal note to Lamiel, quoted in Neefs, “Stendhal, sans fins,” 20. 112. Ibid., 22. 113. Ibid., 27. 114. Stendhal, Vie de Henry Brulard, 177. 115. Ibid., 369, emphasis in original. 116. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 131.

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117. In the sense explicated in §25 and §26—that the phenomenal object can be called sublime only insofar as it gives rise to a feeling of sublimity or elevation in the mind. See ibid., 114, 121. 118. Elisabeth Krimmer writes, “The strongest conceptual link [between war and the sublime] consists in the fact that, in the character of the ideal soldier as in the concept of the sublime, the mind reigns supreme over the body.” Elisabeth Krimmer, The Representation of War in German Literature from 1800 to the Present (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 22. 119. This idea gained wider currency. When Hegel in the Phänomenologie writes that war exposes the community to the force of the negative and thereby elevates (erhebt) the identity of its individual members, he is restating the Kantian claim. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1988), 314–15. 120. Carl von Clausewitz, Verstreute kleine Schriften (Osnabrück: Biblio Verlag, 1979), 228. 121. See Plato’s Ion. For the history of inspiration see also Timothy Clark, The Theory of Inspiration: Composition as a Crisis of Subjectivity in Romantic and PostRomantic Writing (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1997). 122. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 119. 123. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 11: 48–53. 124. As Clausewitz’s Bekenntnisschrift makes clear, it was not the prospect of fighting for Russia but of casting off the Napoleonic yoke that nourished his decision, which would eventually have serious consequences for his career in the Prussian military. See Carl von Clausewitz, Geist und Tat (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag 1942), 100ff. 125. The most recent attempt to track down Tolstoy’s implicit and explicit references is Dan Ungurianu, “The Use of Historical Sources in War and Peace,” in Rick McPeak and Donna Tussing Orwin, eds., Tolstoy on War: Narrative Art and Historical Truth in “War and Peace” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 26–41. While it has not been established that Tolstoy had a firsthand knowledge of Berenhorst and Jomini, my argument does not hinge on direct influence. Rather it pertains to the positions these earlier thinkers articulated and that in various versions are also formulated by Tolstoy in War and Peace. 126. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 9: 317. 127. Ibid., 9: 319. 128. See Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). 129. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 9: 322. 130. Ibid., 11: 47–48. 131. Ibid., 11: 46. 132. Ibid., 11: 48. 133. Ibid., 12: 74. 134. Ibid., 11: 131. 135. Ibid., 9: 229–30. 136. Ibid., 9: 216.

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137. See Olaf Rose, Carl von Clausewitz: Wirkungsgeschichte seines Werkes in Rußland und der Sowjetunion 1836–1991 (München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1995), 32–50, 71–72. 138. Carl von Clausewitz, Hinterlassene Werke, vol. 7: Der Feldzug von 1812  in Rußland (Berlin: Dümmler, 1862), 27. 139. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 11: 207. 140. Friedrich Doepner, “ ‘Krieg und Frieden’ und ‘Vom Kriege,’ ” Europäische Wehrkunde 29 (1980): 1, 25–30. 141. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 11: 221. The term also appears in a depiction of General Bagration in 10: 220. 142. Raymond Aron, Penser la guerre, Clausewitz, vol. 1: L’ âge européen (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1976), 387; Clausewitz, Hinterlassene Werke, 7: 6–8. 143. Recently Andreas Herberg-Rothe has pointed to a similar irony when Tolstoy criticizes the later Clausewitz’s instrumental theory of war but ignores his earlier existential theory that is consonant with Tolstoy’s own view of war. See “Tolstoy and Clausewitz: The Dialectics of War,” in McPeak and Orwin, Tolstoy on War, 143. 144. Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege (Bonn: Dümmler, 1980), 262. 145. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 11: 52. 146. This, however, does not mean that an absolute generic difference obtains between the military treatise of Clausewitz and the novel by Tolstoy, as Val Vinokur and Caryl Emerson have suggested. To regard On War as a “manual” is to read Clausewitz through the scientizing eyes of Tolstoy, and that not only miscategorizes the actual character of his work, but, as I attempt to show, it also misses the somewhat more complex relation between the two writers. Val Vinokur, “Discussion—Tolstoy and War: Literary Representations of War: The Case of Tolstoy,” American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies National Convention. Omni Shoreham, Washington. November 18, 2006. Address, quoted in Caryl Emerson, “Leo Tolstoy on Peace and War,” PMLA 124, no. 5 (2009): 1857–58. 147. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 12: 81. 148. Ibid., 11: 39. 149. Ibid., 12: 110. While Rapoport is correct to point out that Clausewitz and Tolstoy hold opposing views of the power of nation-states to change the course of history, at the micro level of individual action, as well as in their general conception of the state of war as outlined above, they are in agreement. Anatol Rapoport, “Tolstoi und Clausewitz. Zwei Konfliktmodelle und ihre Abwandlungen,” in Günter Dill, ed., Clausewitz in Perspektive: Materialien zu Carl von Clausewitz. Vom Kriege (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1980), 701. 150. A. V. Knowles, Leo Tolstoy: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1997), 19. 151. Ibid., 125. As Gary Saul Morson notes, Tolstoy expressly forbade his publisher to label the work a novel. Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in “War and Peace” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 39. 152. Andrew Wachtel, An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), especially 88–122; Andrew Wachtel,

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“History and Autobiography in Tolstoy,” in Donna Tussing Orwin, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 180. 153. Wachtel, “History and Autobiography,” 181. 154. Morson, Hidden in Plain View, 124. 155. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 11: 182. 156. Ibid., 11: 184. 157. Ibid., 11: 187. 158. Ibid. 159. Ibid., 12: 69. 160. See also chapter 5 of Morson’s Hidden in Plain View for an excellent analysis of Tolstoy’s historiographical critique. 161. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 11: 184. 162. Ibid., 11: 189. Manuel Köppen is quite right to call Pierre a “Schlachtenbummler” (Das Entsetzen des Beobachters, 106). See also Mieszkowski, “Watching War,” 1658–59. 163. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 11: 227. 164. Ibid., 11: 234. 165. Ibid., 11: 191. 166. Ibid., 11: 205. 167. Leo Tolstoy, Povesti i rasskazy (Moskva: Eksmo-press, 2001), 100. 168. Ibid., 102. 169. Ibid., 109. 170. Ibid., 112. 171. See Gary Saul Morson, “The Reader as Voyeur: Tolstoi and the Poetics of Didactic Fiction,” in Tolstoy’s Short Fiction: Revised Translations, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism, edited and with revised translations by Michael R. Katz (New York: Norton, 2008), 389. 172. Tolstoy, Povesti i rasskazy, 150. 173. Jeff Love is correct to point to the “montage” effect Tolstoy creates through the juxtaposition of various perspectives during the battle. The Overcoming of History in War and Peace (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 97. Yet what appears more important for Tolstoy, as it was for Stendhal, is not to piece together an abstract whole out of the individual fragments but the repetition of and insistence on the situated embodied perspective as a means of imparting the state of war to the reader. 174. Paul Boyer, Chez Tolstoi, entretiens à Iasnaïa Poliana (Paris: Institut d’études slaves de l’Université de Paris, 1950), 40. 175. Viktor Shklovsky’s famed “ostranenie,” the estrangement that accompanies a limited perspective, is thus fundamental for Tolstoy’s conception of war. And yet the concept doesn’t quite capture its function in War and Peace. When Shklovsky considers Tolstoy’s representation of war, he regards it as an estrangement whose purpose is to describe war “as if battles were something new.” See Viktor Shklovsky, “Iskusstvo kak priëm,” in Gamburgskii schët (Moskva: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990), 58–72. In the battle scenes in War and Peace, however, the situated perspective has less to do with a re-

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vivification and redescription of objects that have faded into conventionality through habitual interaction. Rather it serves to convey the experience of a pervasive epistemic condition. 176. The “establishing shot,” which Köppen describes as a feature of the Tolstoyan depiction of battle, does not create a foundation or frame that is subsequently filled out by the experience on the ground. Rather the situated perspective erodes the foundation, breaks the frame (Das Entsetzen des Beobachters, 108). 177. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 11: 238. 178. Knowles, Leo Tolstoy, 197. 179. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 12: 314. 180. Ibid., 12: 14. 181. Ibid., 11: 132. 182. Ibid., 11: 56. 183. Wachtel is correct to state that the fictional and the historical discourses remain separate, yet this is not because they state different truths, but because of the irresolvable contradiction of their claims. 184. This curious division has been recapitulated by the scholarship on the map. Where Donna Tussing Orwin regards it as a clear and successful grounding of the fiction in history and in actual geographic space, Molly Brunson claims that the map is anything but clear and that Tolstoy became disillusioned with the narrative potential of the visual schema and quickly abandoned it. My own claim is that the peculiarity of Tolstoy’s map is precisely that it allows for both of these readings. See Donna Tussing Orwin, “The Awful Poetry of War: Tolstoy’s Borodino,” in McPeak and Orwin, Tolstoy on War, in particular 128–32; Molly Brunson, “Panorama P’era: Opticheskaia illiuziia i illiuziia romana v ‘Vojne i mire,’ ” in Galina Alekseeva, ed., Lev Tolstoj i mirovaia literatura: Materialy V mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii (Tula: Izdatel’skii dom “Jasnaia Poliana,” 2008), in particular 80–82. 185. M. I. Dragomirov, Ocherki (Kiev, 1898). For Dragomirov’s general critique of Tolstoy’s representation of war, see also Donna Tussing Orwin’s article “War and Peace from the Military Point of View,” in McPeak and Orwin, Tolstoy on War, 98–110. 186. Dragomirov, Ocherki, 20. 187. Ibid., 20, 21–22. 188. Ibid., 21. 189. Ibid., 23. 190. Ibid., 7. 191. Of course fundamental differences obtain. Like Clausewitz, Dragomirov believes commanders have a great impact on the battle, for while there is no science of war, there is such a thing as an art of war: basic rules of thumb that help manage events on the battlefield. The friction that Tolstoy’s fiction displays is therefore not insurmountable for Dragomirov. See especially ibid., 47, 76, 109. 192. Relying on the semiotic theory of Saussure, Barthes claims that literature is not referential; rather it constitutes a closed, self-referential system, separate from reality: “Writing can no longer designate an operation of registration, of observation,

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of representation, of ‘painting.’ ” Roland Barthes, “La mort de l’auteur,” in Œuvres Complètes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002), 3: 43. In the well-known analysis of Flaubert’s Un Coeur simple, however, the barometer has no apparent semantic function and therefore substitutes the signified with the referent, thus creating the illusion of bringing the real into the story. Roland Barthes, “L’effet de réel,” in Gérard Genette and Tzvetan Todorov, eds., Littérature et réalité (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1982), 82. 193. Dorrit Cohn’s claim that the historical novel is more closely linked to fiction than to historiography only highlights the peculiarity of War and Peace. In this work Tolstoy precisely attempts to overcome what Cohn calls the “great divide” of generic difference. Dorrit Cohn, “Pierre and Napoleon at Borodinó—Reflections on the Historical Novel,” in The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 150–62. 194. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 11: 52. 195. Ibid., 12: 315.

Conclusion 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Morgenröthe (München: de Gruyter, 1999), 120–22. As Ian Hacking notes, this, for Nietzsche, does not rule out necessity. Rather chance and necessity are two sides of the same coin. The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 147–49. 2. William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 31. 3. Ibid., 25. 4. William James, The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Dover, 1956), 19. 5. See John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 4: The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), especially chapter 1, “Escape from Peril.” Quotes are on 6, 16, 17. 6. Dewey once referred to Kant’s Ptolemaic revolution in philosophy, while James claimed that the line of philosophical progress lies “not so much through Kant as round him.” See Dewey’s final chapter, “The Copernican Revolution,” in The Quest for Certainty; William James, “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” University Chronicle 1 no. 4 (1898): 319. 7. Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, 232. 8. It is hardly fortuitous, though. As Louis Menand argues, the American Civil War was the defining experience of the generation that counted Peirce, James, and also Oliver Wendell Holmes. See Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). 9. See Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 45; Richard Shusterman,

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Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), xvii. 10. Honoré de Balzac, Le Colonel Chabert, El Verdugo, Adieu, Le Réquisitionnaire (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1974), 36, 71, 48. 11. See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Alice Becker-Ho and Guy Debord, Le Jeu de la guerre: Relevé des positions successives de toutes les forces au cours d’une partie (Paris: Gallimard, 2006); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux (Paris: Éditions du minuit, 1980). 12. Michel Foucault, Il faut défendre la société: Cours au Collège de France. 1975– 1976 (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 1997), 242, 44. The first volume of Histoire de la sexualité from the same period displays a similar interest in the military basis of society. La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). 13. Foucault, Il faut défendre la société, 144. 14. For an insightful analysis and critique of the concept of strategy in poststructuralist writing see Mette Hjort, The Strategy of Letters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

Acknowledgments

The book issues directly from a triangulation network established between Cambridge, Massachusetts; Copenhagen; and Berlin. In each place I have incurred a tremendous debt of gratitude to a number of teachers, colleagues, and friends—too many to name, but a few I would like to thank individually. First and foremost to William Mills Todd III, Oliver Simons, Tom Conley, and Joseph Vogl, who all contributed their insights and inspiring suggestions to enrich the project and whose incisive criticisms vastly improved my initial drafts. From the beginning Bill supported me and the project in every conceivable way. Few are fortunate enough to have had such a knowledgeable, altruistic, and dedicated teacher. Always in a productive spirit of congeniality, Oliver offered sobering but invaluable criticisms—to the point and essential—along with encouragements when needed, and he was instrumental in helping me find an orga nizing frame for the entire project. First at Harvard and now at Columbia, he continues to be an irreplaceable sparring partner and friend. Tom introduced me to the field of cartography, and without his expertise I would have walked into several open traps. I hope the influence of his enthusiasm and originality can be felt throughout this book. Finally I would like to thank Joseph. At his invitation I came to Berlin and ended up staying much longer than initially planned. Most generous with his time, he offered a host of suggestions, first as a listener and then as a reader. To his sparkling mind I owe many of the insights in the book. Needless to say, any shortcomings are entirely of my own responsibility.

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At Humboldt I would also like to thank Burkhardt Wolf, Jörn Münkner, and the Berlin contingent of the PhD Net Das Wissen der Literatur—in particular ClausMichael Schlesinger, Martina Süess, Dorothea Walzer, Ulrike Wagner, and Timothy Attanucci—for their hospitality, for our discussions, and for many helpful comments on early versions of chapters that I presented there. Jurij Striedter I thank for his recommendations at the very early stages of the project, and Chenxi Tang for his enthusiasm and ideas when our paths crossed in Berlin. I wrote a not unsubstantial part of the book in the now sadly defunct café Il Syndicato while perfectly caffeinated thanks to the connoisseurship of Christoph. A more pleasant workplace cannot be imagined. At Harvard a number of people have in various ways had an impact on my thinking and on the final text, in particular John Hamilton, Peter Gordon, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Richard Moran, Judith Ryan, Helmut Schneider, Jimena Canales, Christopher Dean Johnson, Jim Engell, and Verena Conley. Luke Menand’s work on the pragmatists was always in the back of my mind as I was writing. The two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript offered very useful suggestions, and while in Copenhagen I was also fortunate to have the support of an encouraging and shrewd ghost reader in the form of Frederik Tygstrup. Wanda Di Bernardo and Isaure Mignotte at Harvard and Sabine Imhof and Uta Kabelitz at Humboldt organized all things practical and kept spirits high while navigating the respective bureaucracies on my behalf. Over the years I have learned much from the Cambridge community of scholars and friends: Alec Flyer, Ward Penfold, Anne Rounds, Ana Olenina, Dennis and Yoora Yi Tenen, Jacob Emery, Björn Kühnicke, Ian Fleishman, Clara Masnatta, Morten Ernebjerg and Silke Brodersen, Juan Torbidoni, Simos Zenios, Svetlana Rukhelman, and Guy Smoot. At Harvard University Press I am most grateful to my editors, Kathleen McDermott and Andrew Kinney, for taking on the project and guiding it safely through the various stages of the publication process. That process includes the reviews from the anonymous readers whose thoughtful comments improved many a section. My student Mikkel Boris I thank for his help preparing the index. The archival research into military cartography would not have been possible without the aid of several institutions and librarians in the United States, Denmark, Germany, and France. The magnificent Widener Library with its incredible resources is any scholar’s dream, and I cannot thank its unfailingly helpful staff enough. The fascinating collection of rare books at the Houghton Library was a constant temptation. Joseph Garver in the Harvard Map Collection and Markus Heinz in the Kartenabteilung der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin offered assistance above and beyond the call of duty. In Copenhagen I have also profited from the collections held by Det Kongelige Bibliotek and Forsvarets Bibliotek, while the Staatsarchiv in Dresden and the Musée National des Châteaux de Malmaison & Bois-Préau were helpful in procuring various maps. Frédéric Duprez went out of his way to supply me with a rare document from his personal collection.

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Numerous grants enabled me to devote myself exclusively to the project for various periods of time. I am particularly grateful to the Fulbright Foundation, the Arthur Lehman Fund, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, the Center for European Studies, the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and the Whiting Foundation. The truly magnificent fellowship from the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation made all the difference. Without it I would not have been able to disappear into the archives for long stretches of time, nor would I have benefited from the research communities in Berlin and Cambridge to the same extent. The present work is a direct result of the research time this fellowship bestowed on me in lavish mea sure. During the final stages of the editing process, the book was further supported by a Sapere Aude research award, also from the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation. Portions of Chapter 1 were originally published in “The Refraction of Geometry: Tristram Shandy and the Poetics of War, 1700–1800,” Representations 123 (Summer 2013): 25–52; and portions of Chapter 6 are published in “Critique of Cartographic Reason: Tolstoj on the Media of War,” Russian Literature 77, no. 3 (forthcoming); both are reprinted by permission. My warmest and deepest gratitude is to my family and in particular to my wife, Kristine Bøggild Johannsen, whose patience must be truly infinite. Our greatest joy was the appearance of Benjamin in the midst of everything. He seems to revel in the series of chance events he sets off wherever he goes. And to him this book is dedicated.

Index

Absolute war, 57, 231 Achenwall, Gottfried, 62 Adieu (Balzac), 191–193 Allent, Pierre Alexandre Joseph, 148, 165, 169 Anthropology, and Clausewitz, 78–79, 102 Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Kant), 70, 72–77, 86, 167 Archenholz, Johann Wilhelm von, 52 Aristotle, 27, 58, 64 Aron, Raymond, 144, 231, 250 Aspern-Essling, Battle of, 186, 194 Austerlitz, Battle of, 5, 225, 232, 240 Autodidacticism, 106–107, 110, 112, 115 Bachelard, Gaston, 179 Bakhtin, M. M., 170, 173, 208, 233–234 Balzac, Honoré de, 42, 69, 185–194, 196–198, 204–205, 222, 240, 244–245, 247, 250 Barthes, Roland, 243

Basedow, Johann Bernhard, 107 La Bataille (Balzac), 185–191, 194, 196–197 Baudrillard, Jean, 117–118, 131 Berenhorst, Georg Heinrich von, 7, 38, 46–50, 166, 245; and chance, 51–53, 55–58, 64–65, 67, 109, 189, 232; and history, 38–41, 116, 125, 134 Bernoulli, Jakob, 63 Berthier, Louis-Alexandre, 154, 157–159, 170, 180–182 Berthier, Patrick, 187 Beyle, Marie-Henri. See Stendhal Bildung, 104–105, 113–114; Kleist on, 83–86; and war games, 127, 132 Black, Jeremy, 40 Boethius, 58 Böhme, Hartmut, 78 Borges, Jorge Luis, 33, 188, 251 Borodino, Battle of, 5, 209, 226, 230, 232, 234–237 Brahe, Tycho, 149

318 Bülow, Heinrich Dietrich Freiherr von, 109, 226, 232 Bureau topographique, 152–155, 168, 170, 175 Caesar, Julius, 54, 148 Calon, Étienne Nicolas de, 147, 151 Cartographic apparatus, 8, 120, 145, 147–159, 165, 169, 175, 182, 184, 196 Cartographic literacy, 162–167 Cartography, 6, 210, 247–248; and armament, 168; centralization of, 149–154; and conditioned maps, 173; and drama, 194–196; and geometry, 147–149; and literary croquis, 211–223, 245; militarization of, 149; and military theory, 35–36, 50, 159–162, 194, 229, 241; and mobility, 149, 154–157; and narrative, 183–189, 197–205, 208, 213, 217, 222–223, 227, 229, 235, 239, 241–245; and peace treaties, 169; revolution in, 120, 146–147; scientification of, 149–156; and virtuality, 36, 157–159, 168, 215, 217 Cassini de Thury, César-François, 150 Cassini map of France, 149–150 Certeau, Michel de, 201, 250 Cervantes, Miguel de, 31, 33, 35 Chambers, Ephraim, 19, 21 Chance, 3–4, 7, 17, 19, 50, 84, 133, 135, 182, 189, 208, 222–223, 247–251; and Berenhorst, 51–53, 55–58, 64–65, 67, 189, 232; and Clausewitz, 37, 64–65, 67, 110, 116, 232; and Hegel, 53–56; and Kleist, 84, 94–96, 98; and legal theory, 59; and Pascal, 60; and Sterne, 27–28, 30; and war games, 124, 127–133. See also Contingency; Probability Chaos theory, 66 The Charterhouse of Parma (Stendhal), 197–198, 201, 204–211, 215–223, 239 Chronotopes, 169–183, 208, 223 Clausewitz, Carl von, 2–3, 7, 32, 159, 162, 194, 221, 224, 249–250; and education,

index 109–110; and genius, 78, 232; and the imagination, 166–167; and philosophy, 47, 49–50, 53; and poetics, 133, 137–144, 204, 247; and probability, 37–38, 56–61, 64–67, 69–70, 182, 208; and simulations, 116–117, 119, 125, 129, 132–133, 136–138, 190; and the space of war, 37–38, 42, 46–47, 65; and tact, 76–82, 91, 94, 100, 102; and Tolstoy, 229–233, 237, 241, 243, 245 Coehoorn, Menno van, 10, 25, 39 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 192 Colomb, Romain, 215–216 Conscription, 41, 113–114 Contingency, 2, 4, 7, 109, 115, 175, 179–181, 249; and Aristotle, 58; and Berenhorst, 51, 53; and Boethius, 58; and Clausewitz, 56–59, 61, 64, 66–67, 78, 80, 110, 116–117, 119–120, 143, 167, 232; and fortification, 12, 15; future contingents, 58, 61, 64, 77–78, 111, 129, 134, 179; and Hegel, 53–56; and Kleist, 84–85, 90, 92–96, 98–100, 111–113; and poetics, 8, 12, 27, 30, 133–139, 143–145, 147, 185, 194, 196, 207–209, 220, 222–225, 232, 235–337, 240–241, 247; and war games, 124, 127, 130–132. See also Chance; Probability Coup d’oeil, 154, 166–167 Creveld, Martin van, 42 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 77, 220–221 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 92, 167 Croquis, 154, 169, 198, 247. See also Cartography Cyclopædia (Chambers), 19, 21 Cyon, E. de, 240 D’Albe, Bacler, 146–147, 153, 157, 159 Debord, Guy, 250 Defoe, Daniel, 15, 109 DeJean, Joan, 109 De l’esprit géométrique (Pascal), 17 Deleuze, Gilles, 117, 250

index Dépôt de la guerre, 147–149, 151–155, 168, 175, 182 Derrida, Jacques, 99 Dewey, John, 102, 248–249 Doepner, Friedrich, 230 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 21, 31–33, 35 Dragomirov, M. I., 230, 241–243, 247 Drieu, Alexandre-Frédéric, 194 Drissa camp, 38, 223–224, 226, 229, 244 Dürer, Albrecht, 11 Dynamics of war, 117–120, 124–125, 127, 129, 136–137, 144, 191–194, 200, 241, 244–246 Eckart, Max, 146 Eckstädt, Johann Ludwig Vitzthum von, 154 Elements (Euclid), 19, 30 Emile, or On Education (Rousseau), 107, 109, 112 Empire of chance, 221, 245, 251; and Berenhorst, 4, 51, 53, 55–56, 67, 109, 188, 232; and Hegel, 55–56; and Nietz sche, 248 Empirical, the, 4–5, 9, 47–50, 53–56, 68, 83–84, 86–88, 93, 144, 168, 246; empirical space, 38–41, 169, 249; empirical subject, 48–49, 53, 167; empirical turn, 47, 50; and Hegel, 54–56; and Kant, 70–74, 167; and military theory, 9, 68, 144; and William James, 248–249 Enlightenment, 52, 66, 84, 93, 105, 111–112, 209 Epic, 188, 204–205, 235–237, 241 Epistemic order, 3, 31, 36, 38, 51, 56, 58, 68, 225 Epistemology, 4–6, 36, 51, 56, 82–83, 94, 105, 111, 135, 142, 167, 246; and fortification, 17, 19–20, 30–31, 52; graphic epistemology, 19–20, 23, 50; historical epistemology, 6, 95; and literature, 6, 23, 25, 30–31, 82–85, 94–95, 100–102, 111, 190, 205–206, 211,

319 218, 222–223, 225, 231–233, 236, 238, 239–241; and praxis, 7, 81, 105; and probability, 56–59, 61–62, 64, 66–70, 79, 131; and representation, 5, 9, 11, 23, 26, 66, 135, 139–140, 147, 165, 205–206; and war games, 35, 125, 129, 131. See also Geometry; Know-how; Probability; Tact Erck, Ludwig Freidrich, 46, 110, 113, 119–120 Esposito, Elena, 118 Esprit géométrique, 17, 30, 36, 68 Euclid, 195; and geometry, 28, 58, 65, 67, 249 Experience, 50, 65, 71, 73–74, 81, 110; artificial, 2, 27, 36, 115–118, 124–127, 132, 136, 144; technologies of, 8, 103–104, 144 Fain, Agathon-Jean-François, 152–154, 157 Farinelli, Franco, 167, 222 Fehrbellin, Battle of, 88 Feuille de route, 200–205 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 47–48, 53, 113 Flaubert, Gustave, 233 Fortification, 4, 7, 40, 43, 109, 148; and epistemology, 19–20, 23, 30–31, 46, 51–52; and geometry, 10–15, 19, 21–22, 28, 30, 32, 34–35, 57; and literature, 10–11, 20–23, 26–32, 34–35, 223, 226, 229, 244 Fortuna, 52 Foucault, Michel, 4, 31–32, 62, 81, 247, 250 Frederick II, 30–32, 40, 42, 51–53, 62; and drills, 113, 116, 168, 225 Frehlich, Baron, 128–131 Friction, 64, 74, 119, 131, 241, 243; and Clausewitz, 65–67, 116–117, 119, 129, 137–138, 144, 231–233, 247; and Tolstoy, 231–233, 241–243 Friedrich Wilhelm I, 62 Friedrich Wilhelm II, 168 Friedrich Wilhelm III, 62 Frisius, Gemma, 149

320 Games. See War games Geist. See World spirit Gemüt, 47, 70, 78, 142–144, 221; and Kleist, 91–92, 110–112 Genette, Gérard, 211 Geography, 31–32, 40, 45, 167; military geography, 44, 125, 160; pure geography, 46. See also Terrain; Topography Geometrical order, 7, 18–19, 31, 34, 44, 229, 246 Geometrical spirit. See Esprit géométrique Geometry, 4, 7, 32–33, 36, 39–40, 50, 56–59, 83, 109, 116, 154, 163, 102, 249; and epistemology, 17, 19, 50; and fortification, 10–15, 17, 34; and narrative, 21, 23, 28–31, 109, 207, 227, 229, 232; and triangulation, 148–150, 158, 165. See also Cartography; Epistemology; Fortification; Tristram Shandy; Vauban German Idealism, 3, 47–48, 53, 68, 87–88, 249 Gerrig, Richard J., 199 Godlewska, Anne, 147 Grandes opérations, 7, 32, 42–43, 147, 162. See also Large-scale warfare Graunt, John, 62 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, 92 Grotius, Hugo, 2 Guattari, Félix, 250 Guerlac, Henry, 17 Hacking, Ian, 62, 248 Hegel, G. W. F., 7, 38, 47, 53–56, 58, 87, 187 Hellwig, Christian Ludwig, 120–125, 127, 132 Herbart, Johann Friedrich, 106 Historiography, 5, 133–144, 210, 225, 233–236, 242–243, 247 Hobbes, Thomas, 2, 17, 19, 67, 144 Hölder, Christian Gottlieb, 194–195 Immersion, 27, 92, 145, 192, 196, 199–200, 204, 247

index Ingarden, Roman, 199 Ingénieurs- geographes. See Topographical engineers In medias res, 74, 80, 90–95, 138, 194 Intergeneric osmosis, 239, 243–244 Iser, Wolfgang, 199 Jakobson, Roman, 136 James, Henry, 233 James, William, 248–249 Jena, Battle of, 53, 59, 76, 113, 139 Jomini, Antoine-Henri, 109, 140, 194, 241; and cartography, 159–162; and Stendhal, 207, 224; and Tolstoy, 226, 229, 232, 241, 245 Judgment, 7–8, 62, 70–71, 73, 76–80, 82, 85–86, 92, 94–98, 100–102, 159, 165–167, 221, 249; determinative and reflective judgment in Kant, 77–78; exercising judgment, 103–116, 119, 124, 131–132, 134–135, 137–138, 142–144. See also Critique of Judgment; Tact Kant, Immanuel, 39, 46–47, 49–50, 68, 83, 94, 106, 173, 249; and cartography, 167; and pedagogy, 111–112; and the sublime, 209, 220–222; and tact, 70–81, 86, 92, 94, 101, 142 Kaufmann, Stefan, 167 Keegan, John, 210 Kiesewetter, Johann Gottfried, 77 Kittler, Friedrich, 6 Kleist, Heinrich von, 3, 70, 82–84, 90, 144–145, 207, 219, 247, 249–250; and Bildung, 83–87, 89; and education, 110–113; and Gemüt, 91–92, 110–113; and the Kant-Krise, 83, 86, 94; and poetics, 194–196. See also The Prince of Homburg Know-how, 7, 69, 82, 144 Konvitz, Joseph, 149 Koselleck, Reinhardt, 52

321

index Kriegsspiele, 120–133. See also War games Krug, Wilhelm Traugott, 49, 106, 114–115, 249 Langendorff, Jean-Jacques, 140 Laplace, Pierre- Simon, 7, 38, 61–64, 67, 79 Large-scale warfare, 8, 43, 46, 51, 94, 125, 147. See also Grandes opérations Larisch, Ferdinand Heinrich August von, 170–171, 173–177, 179, 207, 213, 224 Latour, Bruno, 97 Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Hegel), 54–55 Lehmann, Johann Georg, 162–166, 169–170, 210, 215 Lejeune, Louis François, 157 Leuthen, Battle of, 30 Levée en masse, 41, 113 Levin, Harry, 205 Lewin, Kurt, 26 The Life of Henry Brulard (Stendhal), 211–215, 217, 220 Locke, John, 2 Louis XIV, 23, 151 Lukács, György, 187–189, 197 Lüke, Martina, 87 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 148 Maistre, Joseph de, 2 Mapping, literary mapping, 194–196, 219–220, 222–223, 245, 248 Maps, 5–6, 11, 27, 37, 103–104, 144–165, 179, 184, 188, 192, 210–211, 244–245, 247, 251; and aesthetics, 177–180; as chronotopes, 169–170, 173, 177, 179–180; circulation of, 8, 154–157, 165, 175; and cognition, 72–74, 165–167; as discursive objects, 8–9, 20–23, 25, 27–36, 182–185, 223–229, 231, 239, 241–242, 244; as emblems of science, 225, 229, 244; inserted in literary works, 22, 29, 195, 202–203, 212, 214, 216–217,

228; and large-scale warfare, 8, 145, 147; and simulations, 103, 120, 144, 152, 157–159, 247; sketch maps, 169–177, 211–217; and war games, 34–36, 127, 132. See also Cartographic literacy; Cartography; Cassini map of France; Mapping; Poetics Marengo, Battle of, 152, 177–182, 185, 188, 209 Marin, Louis, 175, 215 Marlborough, Duke of, 31–32 Mendelssohn, Moses, 105 Meteorology, 66, 74, 127, 132, 134 Mimesis, 159, 188, 191–192, 200 Modus operandi, 69, 81–82, 92, 102–103, 113, 248, 250 Montbrison, Louis-Simon-Joseph Bernard de, 33–36, 120, 132 Morson, Gary Saul, 234 Namur, Siege of, 20–22, 25 Napoleon, 33, 49, 53–54, 59, 61, 63–64, 69, 76, 80; and cartography, 145–147, 149, 151–160, 162, 168–169, 175, 177–183, 196; as fictional character, 185, 189–190, 199, 205, 209, 213, 231, 239; and warfare, 31–32, 35, 42, 46, 208, 213, 221, 189–190, 199, 205, 207, 209, 221, 224. See also Grandes opérations; Large-scale warfare Narrative: and historiography, 5, 134, 138–140; and modality, 140–144, 235–236; narrative theory, 139, 179, 199–200, 243. See also Cartography; Mapping; Siege warfare; Topography Neefs, Jacques, 219 Nietz sche, Friedrich, 248 Novalis, 87–88, 102 Novi, Battle of, 131 Odeleben, Freiherr von, 155 On Interpretation (Aristotle), 58 Ontology, 56, 117–118, 138, 159, 243

322 On War (Clausewitz), 2, 57, 77, 81, 116, 129, 138, 140–141, 143–144, 167, 230–231, 233, 237, 243 Operational knowledge, 95, 103, 105, 107 Operational logic, 3, 6, 8, 26, 50, 66, 206, 208, 218, 222, 232, 243 Opiz, Johann Ferdinand, 125, 127–129, 131–132, 144 Paret, Peter, 140 Pascal, Blaise, 17, 60, 68 Pavel I, 168 Pedagogy, 69, 103–104, 111–112, 114, 119, 131, 138, 249; and Herbart, 106–107; and Kant, 111–112; and Kleist, 110–113; and Pestalozzi, 107–109; and Rousseau, 107–109, 112, 145; and Rühle von Lilienstern, 104–106, 110, 113–115, 144 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 158, 248–249 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich, 107–109 Petty, William, 62 Phenomenology, 140, 199 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 53–56 Phull, General, 224, 230, 244–245; as fictional character, 38, 223, 225–227, 229–232 Picquet, Charles, 155–156 Plans-reliefs, 23–26, 30 Plato, 117–118, 222 Ploedterl, Johann Franz, 171–172 Poetics, 87, 138, 144, 194, 196–199, 248; and contingency, 27, 133–136, 139, 143; of knowledge, 5, 206; and the novel, 27–28, 30, 185–187, 197, 233, 235, 242–245, 247; and simulations, 103, 142, 193–194, 198, 243; of war, 5–6, 9, 103, 133, 135, 147, 196–197, 204, 211, 225, 245, 247. See also Cartography; Chronotopes; Maps; Narrative; Simulations Poetics (Aristotle), 27 Poisson, Simeon-Denis, 63 Pragmatism or pragmatist, 102, 248–249

index The Prince of Homburg (Kleist), 70, 83, 87–102 Probability: average probability, 57–58, 67; history of probability theory, 58, 61–64; objective probability (frequentist), 61–64; and plot, 28, 34, 134–135, 138–139, 196; probability calculus, 58–61, 64–65, 78, 81, 111; subjective probability (epistemic), 62–64, 248; and war, 4, 7, 38, 56–60, 64, 66–69, 78–79, 101–102, 109, 116, 132, 182, 210, 225, 227, 232, 245–246, 249; and war games, 128–130. See also Chance; Contingency; Epistemology; Know-how; Tact Puysegur, Marquis de, 39–40, 53 Rancière, Jacques, 5 Realism or realistic, 119, 121, 125, 127–128, 130, 190, 191, 193, 205 Realist novel, 8, 145, 183–185, 187, 190, 196–197, 205, 243 Reality effects, 27, 243. See also Simulations; Virtual reality Reason, 17, 136, 144, 240; cartographic reason, 225–229; and Clausewitz, 2, 66, 77–80, 142–143, cunning of reason (Hegel), 54–55; and Kant, 70–71, 73, 75–80, 167, 209, 221–222; and Kleist, 83–87, 91, 94–97, 112 Reconnaissance, 53, 166, 170–172, 175–176 Rogniat, Joseph vicomte de, 35 Romanticism, 87–88, 102, 193, 222 Roth, Paul F., 118 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 2–3, 107–109, 112, 145 Rühle von Lilienstern, Otto August, 7, 38–39, 85, 93, 110, 144–145, 196, 249; and pedagogy, 104–106, 113–115; and terrain, 44–47, 168, 171 Ryan, Marie-Laure, 199–200, 204 Saxe, Maurice de, 53 Schäff ner, Wolfgang, 159

index Scharnhorst, Gerhard von, 77, 113–114, 132–136, 138, 144 Schiller, Friedrich, 92, 110 Sembdner, Helmut, 84 Sevastopol Stories (Tolstoy), 237–239 Seven Years’ War, 27, 30, 39, 46, 52–53, 94 Siborne, William, 170, 210 Siege warfare, 15, 20–23, 26, 207; and architecture, 11–19, 21, 39–40; decline of, 30–33; and narrative form, 27–30; and Tristram Shandy, 20–23, 25–27, 31–33. See also Epistemology; Fortification; Geometry; Plans-reliefs; Vauban Simulations, 7, 117–119, 134, 144–145, 158–159, 168, 175, 247, 251; computer simulations, 27, 118, 145, 200; and education, 103, 115–116, 119, 121; and texts, 8, 134, 136, 140–142, 189–194, 198, 200, 204–205, 211, 222–223, 238, 240, 243, 245, 248; and Tristram Shandy, 26–27, 34–36, 120; and war games, 120–121, 125, 127–133, 223. See also Experience; Maps; Poetics Sketch maps. See Cartography; Mapping; Maps Statistics, 62–63, 101–102, 182 Stendhal, 197–198, 205, 209, 224, 239–240, 244–245; and graphics, 211–218, 222–223, 245; on literary creation, 218–220, 222, 247; and military theory, 207–208. See also Th e Charter house of Parma; Th e Life of Henry Brulard Sterne, Laurence, 7, 10–11, 21–23, 25–31, 33, 35, 173, 183, 209 Sue, Eugène, 197–198 Tact, 8, 69–70, 72–73, 76, 88, 95–96, 98, 248; logical tact, 70–71, 73–74, 76, 86, 92; in pedagogy, 106, 112–113, 115; tact of judgment, 70, 77–82, 91, 94, 100–102, 119, 142–143, 166–167, 230–232

323 Tartaglia, Niccolò, 10, 12 Tasso, Torquato, 188, 205 Technologies of experience. See Experience Teleology, 55–56, 76, 83, 85–86, 89, 92, 113; teleological suspension, 99–100 Terrain, 7–8, 38, 49–50, 134, 186, 189, 194, 197, 201, 227, 234, 250; and cartography, 145, 149, 152, 154, 158, 160–163, 165–167, 170–171, 173, 179, 181, 196, 210, 225; discourse on, 41, 44–46, 50, 65, 67; etymology of, 43–44; and fortification, 12, 15, 148; and large-scale warfare, 32, 132, 147; as part of spatial economy, 44–45, 67; and war games, 34–35, 120–128, 130. See also Geography; Grandes opérations Thoughts (Pascal), 60, 68 Thucydides, 148 Tirailleur, 43 Tolstoy, Leo, 184, 223–245, 247–248 Topographical engineers, 148, 154, 168, 177, 182 Topography, 30, 33–34, 37–38, 41, 44–45, 47, 50, 59, 67, 151, 197–198; and fortification, 15, 21–23, 29–33; and maps, 6, 8, 120, 132, 148–149, 152, 160, 162, 171, 242; and narrative, 199–201, 208, 215, 219; and war games, 34–36, 126. See also Cartography; Geography; Maps; Terrain; Topographical engineers Triangulation, 147–150, 162, 169 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 7, 10–11, 20–21, 27–30, 33, 175 Vauban, Sebastien Le Prestre de, 7, 10–21, 23, 25–26, 30, 32, 39, 43, 46, 65, 109, 148 Vegetius, Flavius, 148 Venturini, Georg, 46, 124–127 Vernet, Carle, 180–181 Virtual reality, 136, 199, 222 Vogl, Joseph, 5 Vom Kriege (Clausewitz). See On War

324 Wachtel, Andrew, 233–235 Wagram, Battle of, 5, 185–186, 188, 194, 209 War and Peace (Tolstoy), 184, 224–225, 227, 229–230, 232–235, 239–245, 248 War games, 6, 33–34, 36, 103–104, 115, 140–141, 158, 192, 223, 250; and causality, 124–125, 128; and chess, 34–36, 120–124, 128, 141, 158, 189, 207; and computers, 27, 118, 145; and dice, 127–130, 132, 144, 196, 223, 245, 251. See also Kriegsspiele

index War matrix, 2–3, 184, 188, 194, 206, 218, 241, 246, 248, 251 Wars of the Spanish Succession, 21, 26, 31 Waterloo, Battle of, 198–201, 204–206, 208–211, 215, 217, 220–221, 223, 239 Whitman, James Q., 58–59 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 105 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 120, 166 World spirit, 53–56 Zenge, Wilhelmine von, 85–86