Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form by Paul Saint-Amour

Abstract

Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form, by Paul Saint-Amour. Oxford University Press, 2015. 347 pages. In a recent NewYork Times blog entry entitled Waiting for the Bomb to Drop, Paul Saint-Amour writes what amounts to an addendum to his new book, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, and Encyclopedic Form. In this short piece, he outlines the difficult realities of readying oneself for inevitable doom in the twenty-first century, tracing the affective state of constant and incessant worry from drone warfare to ecological collapse. He writes, for instance, that the immanent threat presented by drones produces Pakistani civilians who suffer from sleeplessness, bad dreams, loss of appetite, fainting, amplified startle reactions, outbursts of anger and emotional breakdowns (2015). But even when drones are not attacking, he asserts, the potential for violence and surveillance has become a part of everyday life. Turning to the ecological, Saint-Amour articulates a crucial connection between drone warfare and climate change: like the costs of warfare, the geographical effects of climate change are distributed unevenly. The global north, for the most part, can exist as it climate change is not happening, as though it is a distant threat exoticized and dehumanized by images of drifting and unmoored polar bears or collapsing glaciers. For those living in the global north the threats presented by, say, oil extraction only occasionally--albeit spectacularly--make themselves known. This constitutes a sharp distinction from the staggering rate of nearly two oil spills a day across the Niger Delta. I begin with this blog post because the uneven geographically distributed perpetual worry of the twenty-first century holds close affective and geographic ties to Saint-Amour's electrifying study of the affective states of Britain. Both the current period and the earlier one are characterized, in his account(s), by a connection between shifts in warfare and constant, overriding worry. This parallel makes Tense Future a book that straddles historical periods, commenting obliquely yet cogently on the present, while offering a nuanced, well-researched, and exciting portrait of mid-century British airpower, literature, and culture. Saint-Amour argues that shifts in warfare from ground to air rearranged methods of aligning with the world and in this way crept into every part of the British national consciousness. By focusing on WWI airpower, he is able to describe the period as beset by a conditional space of that forced a wide-ranging rearticulation of historical and theoretical criticism (3). In his introduction, Saint-Amour describes a future-oriented criticism that seeks to show how the anticipation of catastrophe reorients contemporary theories of potentiality. Taking Jacques Derrida's assertion that mourning and literary archives must be thought in relation to the nuclear condition, and applying this insight to the massive paradigm shift that occurs when war moves its theater from the ground to the air, Saint-Amour delinks nuclear criticism from the nuclear age. Doing so allows Saint-Amour to eloquently argue (pace Benjamin) for brushing futurity against the grain, setting in motion a vibrant tension that informs the rest of his book. For some theorists in recent years, potentiality is an expression of the potential for revolution or resistance; by contrast, Saint-Amour is concerned with the potential for stress, worry, anticipation, and dread to organize everyday life. This offers a welcome expansion of the models of futurity available to contemporary critical theory. The remainder of Tense Future is split into two parts. The surveys literature as a response to the shift in the scope of warfare occasioned by the increased speed and destructive power of aerial fighting. In this reading Virginia Woolf emerges as an author haunted by the perpetual suspense of the air raid siren, and the archivist Hilary Jenkinson is conscripted as the theorist of an interwar cri de coeur from the first catastrophist archive theory (168). …