The Textual-Sonic Landscape of Jacques Perret's Des Fortifications Et Ertifices

It’s exciting to contribute to the dialogue here because, despite our divergent historical interests, I feel a strong intellectual kinship with the editor of this blog. Rendered in striking graphic form and rife with modernist literary references, the editor’s recent design research on architecture in the West Bank explores the full range of oppressive and emancipatory potentials in an aesthetics of militarization. We must of course heed the warning (pace Baudrillard) that an aestheti-cization of war runs the risk of dulling the senses to the reality of vio-lence. Yet it’s equally disempowering, especially for the disempow-ered, to reduce this violence to the mechanics of technical reason. War from the beginning is aesthetic: for the complicit it’s mediated by political propaganda; for the traumatized victim, it’s fought on a psychological, as well as a physical, battlefield. If our poetic relation to war forms our escapist habits, I believe it also bears the potential to catalyze emancipatory action.