Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Cyberwar, Infowar, Technowar, Antiwar, Postwar. You've seen it on TV, and played the videogame. Now you can read the book that separates the hype from the real in the hyperreality of postmodern war. Chris Hables Gray combines high theory, popular culture, and archival material with an apocalyptic power." --James Der Derian, PhD, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, author of
Anti-Diplomacy"Written for both a broad popular audience and for serious intellectuals, Gray's account of postmodern war is animated by a vision of a possible peace. Postmodern war, emerging from the cauldron of World War II, is based on critical mutations in scale, compression of events, expanded battle space, and above all on cyborg weapons systems. Gray richly details the emergence of myriad human-machine weapons systems as they change the face of war and the stakes for peace. Postmodern War provides a sweeping vision of the history of war and the emergence of its specifically late 20th-century form. Alert to paradoxes, Gray shows postmodern war to be a perverse and critical species of progress inextricably linked to globalized technoscience, computers, and information. Gray is attentive to the sensuous pleasures and fierce beauty, and above all to the profound insanity of war and weapons. He asks how war works and what continues to make it possible. The question at the heart of Postmodern War is simple: How did contemporary war, with its obscene proliferating cyborg artifacts and practices, come about? What is different about postmodern war, and how can that difference ground sustained work for peace? Postmodern War is ambitious, large, sometimes rambling, but always compelling in its telling and horrific detail and passionate hope. Postmodern War is written against denial and for the possibility of truly changing the rules of engagement in our war-ready and war-saturated time." --Donna Haraway, PhD, University of California, Santa Cruz
Review
"[Gray's] demonstration of the emotional relationship between humans and 'technoscience' is provocative."--Publishers Weekly
Synopsis
From Operation Desert Storm to the conflict in Bosnia, computerization and other scientific advances have brought about a revolution in warfare. This book shows how our high-tech age has spawned both increasingly powerful weapons and a rhetoric that disguises their apocalyptic potential in catch phrases like "smart weapons," "cyberwar," and "bloodless combat." A skillful combination of trenchant cultural study, provocative illustrations, and engrossing military, technical, and historical analysis,
Postmodern War sheds new light on the ways we conceptualize and conduct war today.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 278-304) and index.
About the Author
Chris Hables Gray is a 10th generation Californian who received his BA from Stanford University and his Ph.D. from the History of Consciousness Board at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) in 1991. Since then he has been a fellow at the Oregon State University (OSU) Center for the Humanities, a NASA History Fellow, and an Eisenhower Fellow at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. His teaching experience includes lecturing at UCSC, guest professorships at OSU and Masaryk, and two years with Goddard College. Currently he is an associate professor of Cultural Studies of Science and Technology and of Computer Science at the University of Great Falls, Great Falls, Montana where he lives with his wife Jane Lovett Wilson and their two sons, Corey and Zachary.
Table of Contents
Introduction: From Sarejevo to Sarejevo, the USS Oklahoma to Oklahoma City
I. The Present
1. Real Cyberwar
2. Computers at War: Kuwait 1991
3. Military Computerdom
4. The Uses of Science
II. The Past
5. The Art of War
6. Modern War
7. The Emergence of Postmodern War: World War II
8. Postmodern Wars Imaginary and Real: World War III and Vietnam
9. The Systems of Postmodern War
III. The Future
10. The Cyborg Soldier: Future/Present
11. Future War: U.S. Military Plans for the Millennium
12. Future Peace: The Remaking of Scientists and Soldiers
13. War and Peace 2000