Introduction: War, culture, technology

Abstract

This issue presents four articles that, in their different ways, consider directly or indirectly the representation and reception of technology in cultural representations of warfare from the early twentieth century to the present. Since World War I, cultural representations of technological developments used in and around warfare have often expressed the dehumanizing effect of technology on the experience of warfare. Often war is no longer perceived as a product of human agency, but as the result of anonymous scientific processes that occlude human agency; war is no longer the realm of the hero, but of the unfeeling technician. It was this abuse of science and technology in World War I that contributed to a loss of faith in science’s potential, ultimately leading to a collapse in the western meliorist spirit. Yet, the technology of warfare has also had a less acknowledged effect on the arts in the West; the experience of technology in combat has in fact profoundly altered some western artists’ perspective and understanding of the world they seek to represent, informing a new dynamic in the relationship between art and technology in their works. In many ways, the first four articles of the present issue reflect this ambivalent attitude towards science and technology in a variety of cultural representations of war in the West. Jonathan Black considers the representation of weaponry and of combat by the British artist Charles Sargeant Jagger on the memorial to the World War I dead of the Royal Regiment of Artillery, inaugurated in London in 1925. Here, Black argues, representations of the technology of war served to give expression not only to veterans’ memory of the conflict and of their suffering but also to the British soldier’s dignity and dogged