The Aesthetic Influences of War: A Phenomenology of Tim Hetherington’s ‘Feedback Loop’

Abstract

One of the artistic motivations and main contributions of the late war photographer Tim Hetherington was to visually explain how young men fighting in war are influenced by representations of war—a process he referred to as a ‘feedback loop’. This article accompanies Hetherington’s ‘visual explanations’ with a theoretical one. Drawing on Gadamer’s hermeneutics and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, I develop a framework for understanding how representations influence realities of war. In particular, I theorize how aesthetic forms are understood, embodied, and enacted, and how they thereby become historically continuous. To illustrate this framework, I conduct a brief genealogy of three aesthetic themes of war captured by Hetherington—of militarized masculinity, of the ideal of the professional soldier, and of the paradoxical absurdity of war. This article will be of interest to scholars seeking to better understand the culture of modern war and the intimate relationship between war and broader society.