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.

Keywords:

• Tim Hetherington
• feedback loop
• war art
• photography
• aesthetic influence
• phenomenology
• hermeneutics

Introduction

How do artistic representations of war, such as Hollywood war movies, influence the behaviour of soldiers in war? The late war photographer, Tim Hetherington, was directly concerned with this question. Fascinated more broadly with the relationship between young men and war, Hetherington was particularly interested in how young male fighters had an ‘obsession with their own image’¹ and how this image was constructed in relation to representations of war in popular culture—a process he referred to as a ‘feedback loop’. In the words of his friend and colleague, James Brabazon, one of Hetherington’s main contributions was to ‘visually explain’ how ‘young men are influenced by the commercial imagery of war [and how they] then re-enact that imagery when they find themselves in war’ (Junger et al. 2013, my emphasis). Unfortunately, Hetherington’s work on this theme was cut short by his premature death in Libya in 2011 while following the rebel advances against Gadhafi’s forces.² In this article, I aim to accompany Hetherington’s ‘visual explanations’ of war’s aesthetic influences with a theoretical one. In particular, I consider how the soldier’s bodily gesture, as captured in mediums such as photography, can reveal the aesthetic influences which constitute the soldier’s experiences and behaviour in war.

To do so, I draw on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics and on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Gadamerian hermeneutics offers a framework for understanding how we aesthetically encounter artworks and the effect this encounter has on who we are. From here, I theorize how the aesthetic meaning of a war movie—as a type of art, in the Gadamerian sense—is ‘taken up’ by the soldier who watches it, thereby constituting his self-image as a soldier.³ Gadamer’s hermeneutics, however, does not explore the link between understanding and behaviour, and to address this dimension of aesthetic influence I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of (bodily) perception. As Merleau-Ponty argues, we are nothing beyond our bodies; and the understanding which results from aesthetic encounters is therefore acquired through the body and will thereafter be manifest in the structure of behaviour. Furthermore, Merleau-Ponty clarifies the inherent agency involved in aesthetic experience: When we observe art, we are not merely ‘in-fluenced’ (i.e. we are not passive receptacles into which aesthetic meaning ‘flows’); perception, rather, is always active, and that which we become through aesthetic experience should accordingly be understood as a form of agency—albeit conditioned by the finite historical sources of aesthetic forms. Combining these theorists allows me to offer a framework for understanding how art about war influences human experience and conduct in war. Building on this hermeneutic-phenomenological perspective, I define the feedback loop as the embodiment and re-enactment of historically contingent aesthetic forms; it is the existential process of actively ‘taking up’ what has been ‘handed down’.⁴

I develop this framework theoretically in the first half of this paper. In the second half, I then conduct a hermeneutical-phenomenological analysis of some of the photographs Hetherington took while embedded with American troops in Afghanistan (Hetherington 2010, Imperial War Museum 2022a). Focusing on what I perceive to be three dominant themes captured by Hetherington—namely, militarized masculinity, the ideal of the professional soldier, and the paradoxical absurdity of war—I attempt to discern the aesthetic meanings latent in the soldiers’ bodily gestures by visually correlating Hetherington’s photographs with representations in popular culture, in particular, with Hollywood productions. My aim is not a cultural/historical analysis of these themes per se, but an illustration of the framework developed in the first half of this paper by visually foregrounding the aesthetic influences which ontologically link representations and realities of war. In particular, I seek to show how the continuity of aesthetic form is dependent on acts of embodiment and self-imaging. This analysis of the feedback loop allows us to see how social actors are firmly situated in history, but also how history is contingent on human agency—on creatively interpreting and re-enacting historically contingent aesthetic forms.⁵

The main theoretical contribution of this article, as such, is to offer a framework for understanding how the body becomes the locus of the continuity between artistic representations and realities of war. The main methodological contribution, meanwhile, is to emphasise the sociological validity of ‘visual explanations’ such as Hetherington’s photography for our ability to understand behaviour in war. This article may also be of interest to those working in the following areas: First, by showing how representations of war (which often abound in peacetime) influence war itself, this article contributes to literature which seeks to better understand the intimate relationship between war and broader society (e.g. Barkawi and Brighton 2011). Second, by showing how soldiers embody, experience, and enact/perform aesthetic meanings of war, this article contributes to research concerned with corporeal experiences of war (e.g. Sylvester 2011, McSorley 2013). Lastly, this article contributes to a nascent but growing trend to employ phenomenological methods in war studies (Brighton 2011, Narozhna 2021, Gilks 2021b).

A hermeneutic-phenomenological critique of aesthetic influence

The implicit claim of Tim Hetherington’s war photography is that the still image of the soldier’s body can capture the effect that artistic representations of war have on war itself. This implies not only that soldiers who fight in war are influenced by art about war, but that this influence is manifest through bodily gesture. The term influence, however, is philosophically and sociologically ambiguous. Etymologically, it implies to flow in—in this context, evoking the notion of meaning ‘flowing’ from the artwork into the viewers body, thereafter structuring their experience and behaviour. Indeed, what has now become an everyday term is in fact rooted in mystical and metaphysical notions of invisible and insensible forces which somehow infuse lived experience.⁶ This philosophical ambiguity is in turn consequential for its sociological validity: Methodologically, it is unclear what ‘influence’ means other than that there is generally a causal correlation between some observed phenomenon (in this case, artistic representations) and the experience and behaviour of subjects (in this case, the soldier whose behaviour correlates with those representations). It is therefore the sociological imperative (and my aim in this section) to demystify what is essentially a metaphorical and metaphysical notion by explaining the mechanisms by which ‘influence’ operates. I do so first by theorizing how we ‘experience’ art, and then how this ‘experience’ is manifest in bodily gesture.

Experiencing art: Gadamer and the structure of understanding

To say that someone is ‘influenced’ by an artwork is to say that they are somehow altered by it. This alteration begins with aesthetic experience—with the encounter with the work of art. Through the aesthetic encounter we come to understand the artwork in a particular way; and this understanding feeds into the existential alteration which takes place thereafter. Within his broader agenda of developing a philosophical hermeneutics, Gadamer was directly concerned with this phenomenon; and in this sub-section I consider his theory to the extent that it is relevant to my overall aims below.

To appreciate Gadamer’s theory of aesthetic experience it is first necessary to outline his broader hermeneutic theory of consciousness. For Gadamer, consciousness is essentially hermeneutic. This means not only that all momentary and immediate experience is spatially and temporally (historically) situated, but that this situatedness—bounded by temporal and spatial horizons—is what makes experience possible in the first place (Gadamer 1960). As we will see below, this situatedness determines the types of (aesthetic) experiences a subject will have. Furthermore, momentary experience—and the understanding in which it manifests—is essentially interpretative: There is no such things as pure, direct insight; all understanding, rather, is dialogically and playfully negotiated with the entities we encounter (Gadamer 1960: 396). In this theory of understanding, Gadamer is developing Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology which places an emphasis on the fact that Being is always Being-in-time—with the methodological implication that to understand Being we must understand the processes through which it is temporally (historically) situated (Gadamer 1960: 250, Cf. Heidegger 1927: 62[38]; 275[232]).

For Gadamer, a paradigm case for appreciating the process through which we acquire understanding in general is the aesthetic encounter with the work of art (Gadamer 1964: 102, 1993: 70). As such, Gadamer theorizes the aesthetic encounter as essentially hermeneutical, a position which rejects both subjectivist and objectivist/universalist notions of aesthetic experience. For Gadamer, subjectivism—which exclusively emphasises the subject’s experience of the artwork and the meaning they endow on it—cannot account for the continuity of aesthetic experience through history. In Gadamer’s words: The ‘appeal to immediacy, to the instantaneous flash of genius […] cannot withstand the claim of human existence to continuity and unity of self-understanding’ (Gadamer 1960: 83–84). But neither does the work of art exhibit an objective and universal meaning, independent of the act of observing. Such a position fails to understand how the artwork itself is a product of history—that it is the ‘act of a mind and spirit that has collected and gathered itself historically’ (Gadamer 1960: 83). A hermeneutic theory of aesthetic experience is therefore needed to take account of both the historicity of the artwork (including the historicity of its author and how the work itself has come to be historically situated) as well as the historicity of the reader/viewer, which determines the interpretative frames applied in the act of reading/viewing.

To understand the hermeneutic structure of aesthetic experience, Gadamer theorizes the encounter with the work of art as a dialogue. This dialogical notion of understanding has several implications. First, it emphasises the inherently temporal and processual dimension of understanding: As mentioned above, Being is necessarily Being-in-and-through-time; and understanding, as such, is not a timeless phenomenon but an ‘event’ (Gadamer 1960: 478). Second, it emphasises the ontological significance of language—that ‘universal medium in which understanding occurs’ (Gadamer 1960: 390; original emphasis). Indeed, it is because of language, broadly conceived, that we are able to comprehend art—even when the artistic medium is ‘silent’ (Gadamer 1964: 98–104). Third, and more specifically, the structure of (aesthetic) understanding as dialogical emphasises the inherent back-and-forth process through which understanding comes into being. To begin with, understanding, like a dialogue, presupposes questions; and these questions necessarily anticipate certain meanings (Gadamer 1960: 293–94). Indeed, for Gadamer ‘We cannot have experiences without asking questions’ since questions ‘break open’ the meanings we come to possess (Gadamer 1960: 356–57). Experience is therefore conditioned by a certain openness (Gadamer 1960: 359–60); and this openness, as discussed above, is determined by our historical situatedness. Next, and in reply to our questions, the artwork ‘speaks’ to us and as such our aesthetic experience is brought about by our ‘trying to understand what the text [/artwork] is saying’ in response to our questions (Gadamer 1960: 270, 1964: 98). For Gadamer, it is this dialogical back-and-forth which constitutes our interpretative understanding and which transfigures the inanimate thing into a meaningful object which ‘sets up a world of its own, into which we are drawn, as it were’ (Gadamer 1993: 71).

Based on this theory of hermeneutic aesthetics we can reflect on the validity of the notion of aesthetic ‘influence’. As we saw above, aesthetic influence implies—both etymologically and colloquially—that meaning somehow ‘flows’ from the artwork into the viewer, where the viewer is relatively passive and the ‘flowing’ meaning operates by some exogenous force. From a hermeneutic perspective, this implication is problematic because it hypostatises the ‘flowing’ aesthetic meaning, thereby overlooking the act of the viewer and the processes through which they dialogically actualise the meaning of the artwork—a meaning which, until then, remained only a dormant possibility. While steering clear of subjectivism by showing that aesthetic meaning has an ontological structure and is historically continuous, Gadamer’s hermeneutic aesthetics also reminds us that all understanding necessarily involves interpretative application on the part of the viewer (Gadamer 1960: 335; 385).

In sum: Gadamer’s hermeneutics offers a framework for understanding how the viewer of art comes to understand the aesthetic meanings which the work expresses. Avoiding the untenable positions of both subjectivism and objectivism, Gadamer shows how meaning is dialogically and playfully negotiated in the course of an historically situated aesthetic encounter. Rooted in the hermeneutic notions of interpretation and understanding, however, Gadamer does not offer an account of how aesthetic meaning is embodied and how it thereafter structures behaviour. For this, I turn to Merleau-Ponty.

Embodying art: Merleau-Ponty and the structure of behaviour

To say that someone is influenced by an artwork is not only to say that they have experienced the meaningfulness of the work in a particular way, but that this meaningfulness has changed the way they interact with the world. That is, aesthetic influence alters not only the structure of experience but also the structure of behaviour. It is therefore necessary to go beyond considerations of how art is aesthetically experienced to explore how aesthetic forms are embodied and enacted, and to explore to what extent they are thereby visible through the bodily gesture. To do so, I consider here Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of (bodily) perception. Merleau-Ponty offers a complex and holistic view of the human condition such that individual features of existence—experience, behaviour, self-image, and agency—cannot be understood in isolation but must be conceived in their fundamental interrelatedness. From here, it will be possible to trace the visible effects of aesthetic forms as they are expressed through bodily gestures as soldiers outwardly manifest their aesthetic understanding of war art.

One of Merleau-Ponty’s main contributions was to effectively critique the Cartesian distinction between mind and body (a distinction which upholds the related distinction between experience and behaviour) by showing how ‘mind’ (or ‘soul’) is extended across and embedded in the body.⁷ Merleau-Ponty’s critique entails showing that there is not a causal relationship between mind and body; the mind, rather, ‘realizes’ itself through the body (Merleau-Ponty 1942: 209; 204). As with Gadamer, therefore, Merleau-Ponty is keen to reveal the limitations of causal thinking. From here, Merleau-Ponty can show that experience is not the domain of the mind while behaviour that of the body; experience, rather, takes place in and through a body which is the ‘bearer of behavior’, while behaviour is in a constant dialectic with the experience it manifests (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 364; 245).

Within Merleau-Ponty’s holistic understanding of behaviour, the dialectic which takes place between experience and behaviour must in turn be understood within the broader context of self-understanding and agency. For Merleau-Ponty, causal conceptions of behaviour which characterize stimuli (whether external or internal) as causes cannot grasp the broader existential context within which behaviour is structured (Merleau-Ponty 1942: 130; 180). When, for instance, there is a behaviour we want to understand (such as a soldier charging to his death) the right methodological question is less What causes this behaviour than How can we make sense of this behaviour within the context of the given existential milieu? As such, the ‘cause’—if this term must be used—is not some localized stimuli within (an ‘impulse’) nor an external ‘force’ (the order to charge, for example), but rather the self-understanding that the soldier has of himself as someone who does such a thing in such a context—as someone who is prone to such impulses and is complicit with such orders. This self-understanding, as such, constitutes a form of freedom—not the freedom of abstract decisions of the will (a philosophical chimera, for Merleau-Ponty), but that involved in taking up a project in the world, of choosing to be someone who behaves a certain way (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 460–83). Thus, ‘the genuine choice’, for Merleau-Ponty, ‘is the choice of our whole character and of our way of being in the world’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 463); and it is these broader life choices which, in turn, condition the experience and behaviour of momentary life. This is not to deny the constraints of history but only to emphasise the agency necessary to give history its meaning (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 475).

Having theorized this holistic view of behaviour and experience, we can now return to consider the effect that the aesthetic encounter has on the bodily gesture. To be aesthetically ‘influenced’ or ‘impressed’⁸ is not the act of a detached and contemplating mind but rather that of an embodied being which perceptively engages with the artwork and the world within which it exists. First, the artwork’s meaning must be experienced through the body. As Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us, are only there because they awaken an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them’ (Merleau-Ponty 1960: 164–65). This meaning, however, is not merely mediated from body to ‘mind’—traditionally conceived as that independent epistemic faculty which constitutes the understanding. The mind, as we have seen, is in and through the body; and meaning resides nowhere but in and through embodied being. The body, moreover, should not be understood as a passive receptacle of aesthetic meaning. Once ‘influenced’ and ‘impressed’ with meaning, the body will carry forth those meanings, emanating them outwardly in the form of behaviour and inwardly in the form of continued experience. The body, to use Merleau-Ponty’s term, can be understood as ‘a knot of living significations’ (1945: 153) which constitutes the continuity of aesthetic meaning. We can therefore expect to find traces of aesthetic meaning in the bodily gesture—in bodily posture and in facial expression.⁹

Theoretical conclusions

The theoretical challenge of this paper is to develop a framework for understanding how soldiers are aesthetically influenced by artworks and how this influence is visibly manifest through their bodily gestures—a process which constitutes a feedback loop between art and reality. In this section, I have tried to show that bringing together Gadamerian hermeneutics and Merleau-Pontian phenomenology can facilitate the development of such a framework. As Gadamer shows, understanding is necessarily a situated and dialectical process through which we playfully and dialogically negotiate the meaning of an artwork. As such, we are neither passively determined by the work itself, nor do we have the artistic freedom to determine the work’s meanings—which are ‘handed down’ to us in the form of tradition. Rather, we must actively ‘take up’ (‘re-awaken’ or ‘re-create’) those meanings in lived experience (Gadamer 1960: 387). As Merleau-Ponty shows, however, we must not overlook how understanding is contingent on embodied being: We exist in and through the body, and the body is our means of encountering and coming to understand the meaningfulness of an artwork. Since aesthetic meaning resides nowhere but in embodied understanding, therefore, we can conceive of the body as the vehicle of historically contingent aesthetic forms.¹⁰

From this theoretical perspective, we can interpret the bodily gesture as captured in the still image and attempt to describe the aesthetic forms (‘impressions’ and ‘influences’) which it emanates. Since the body is the condition for the possibility of the historical continuity of aesthetic meaning, then we can expect to find in the still image of the human body a continuity between the work of art and the bodily gesture. And in light of this continuity, we can then hypothesize the ontological link between viewing and understanding aesthetic forms, on the one hand, and self-understanding, self-imaging, and performance in relation to those forms, on the other. This will be my aim in the next section, where I consider how American soldiers photographed by Tim Hetherington in Afghanistan embody aesthetic forms ‘taken up’ from popular war culture in American society, and how these embodiments therefore constitute a feedback loop between artistic representations of war and war itself.

Aesthetic influences in contemporary American warfare

Hetherington’s war photography, especially his work on American soldiers in Afghanistan, has been highly acclaimed.¹¹ Intuitively, this acclaim perhaps needs no explanation: Hetherington’s photographs mesh beauty and insight in an affective and provocative way. Beyond this intuitive judgement, however, how do we account for the artistic and ethnographic merit of Hetherington’s photography? In this section, I build on the theory developed above to argue that the artistic validity of Hetherington’s Afghanistan collection lies in its ability to disclose the historically contingent aesthetic forms which structure the life-world of the American soldier. In Gadamerian terms, Hetherington discloses a hermeneutic truth in the form of historical meanings which ‘influence’ the American soldier and which (in Merleau-Pontian terms) are visibly manifest through their bodily gestures. To make this argument, I conduct a brief analysis of the bodily gestures represented in Hetherington’s photographs. Focusing, in turn, on the themes of militarized masculinity, the culture of military professionalism, and on the paradoxical expression of the absurdity of war, I present Hetherington’s photographs alongside stills taken from Hollywood war movies or television series which expresses the same aesthetic theme.¹² My aim is not to offer a thorough genealogical analysis of the given aesthetic theme (which is beyond the scope of this paper) but to illustrate the logics of the feedback loop as theorized above, i.e., to demonstrate the continuity of aesthetic forms across representations of war and war itself, and to show how the soldier’s body becomes the vehicle of this continuity.

The ‘macho shit’

As noted above, one of Hetherington’s main ambitions through his war photography was to understand the relationship between war and (in particular) young men. Indeed, Infidel—Hetherington’s (2010) published book from his time embedded with American soldiers in Afghanistan—is a testament to this fascination and might broadly be understood as an ethnographic exploration of the aesthetic structure of the masculine form in war. The postures of the male soldiers he photographs range from unequivocal spectacles of militarized masculinity (with, for example, ritualistic displays of bravado) to what might be understood as gender neutral gestures (a final section, for instance, documents the soldiers sleeping defencelessly, giving them an innocent child-like appearance and providing contrast with their wakeful masculinized gestures). One section which particularly emphasises the culture of militarized masculinity focuses on the aggressive rituals the soldiers perform on one another within the confines of their outpost (Hetherington 2010: 124–35). On certain special occasions—such as birthdays, or when a soldier was departing/returning from leave—soldiers were ‘blooded’ (ganged up on and beaten) by the rest of the platoon (Hetherington 2010: 236). ‘In the end’, Hetherington wrote in his personal diary at the same time, ‘this is inevitably what happens. The macho shit comes out’ (diaries).¹³

Besides such violent rituals, another distinctive dimension of masculinized warrior culture in contemporary American society is a more affectionate male bonding which, since Achilles’ affection for Patroclus onwards, has found an outlet in the context of war. Hetherington focused on this theme extensively. Figure 1, for example, succinctly captures the spirit of camaraderie between US soldiers at their outpost in the Korengal Valley. How can we understand the behaviour in this photograph, and specifically the aesthetic-cultural influences which run through it? Before answering this question, it is necessary to interpret both the scene itself and the relationship between soldiers and photographer. In particular, what is the significance of this kiss—given that it is seemingly performed for the camera; and what, in turn, is the validity of the photograph—given that it seemingly motivates that which it captures?

FIGURE 1 Tim Hetherington (2008), US army soldiers, Afghanistan. © Imperial War Museum, DC 92602.

In his personal diary leading up to his death in Libya, Hetherington expresses a direct concern with such questions. He reflets on how, ‘in photography, we are urged to eschew truth for the sake of beauty’ (diaries). He also problematises the effect the photographer has on the scene when he writes: ‘Men doing thumbs up in the middle of battle. Would they do this without a camera present – I guess not’ (diaries). Notwithstanding the way the photographer might embellish or beckon into existence (as is here the case) that which he is supposed to capture/represent, however, I want to suggest that, in this case, Hetherington discloses something essentially true (in a phenomenological/hermeneutical sense) about the soldiers he photographs. To explore this point, it is necessary to conceptualize the scene as a dialectic between performance and camera, between soldier and photographer. The camera, it is true, beckons forth a kiss—a kiss which is therefore performed for the camera. It would be a mistake, however, to understand this kiss as insincere or as devoid of existential significance (and therefore to understand the photograph as sociologically invalid). The ‘performance', rather, expresses the way the soldier wants to be seen by others, and therefore the way he wants to see himself; it is, as such, an expression of self-understanding and self-imaging. In existentialist terms, the kiss is an act of self-making, of becoming: In a flash, the soldier sees the camera, sees the photograph the camera produces, sees the audience seeing the photograph, and sees himself as the kind of soldier he wants to become, thereby performing his self through the aperture of a camera and becoming what he wants to be. The camera, in this sense, is not a motive for the kiss per se, but serves as a kind of essential Other—in a Sartrean sense—which allows the soldier to objectify himself in accordance with an idealized self-image.¹⁴ The photograph, as such, acquires a special validity in its disclosure of the soldier’s existential motives.

Once we understand the photograph as existentially significant in this sense, we can ask what motivated and influenced the kiss and why the soldier wanted to perform his (idealized) self in this way. As discussed above, one way this could be done is by correlating the soldier’s bodily gesture with representations in popular culture, and then by visualizing a broader hermeneutic universe—to use Gadamer’s (1960: xxviii) term—within which such performances make sense. Figure 2, for example, is a sequence of scenes from Hollywood war movies which represent the affectionate and physically intimate camaraderie between men in contemporary war.¹⁵ While Black Hawk Down and Forrest Gump represent ‘serious’ attempts to depict the reality of contemporary camaraderie, Tropic Thunder, in its comedic method, underscores the contingency and performativity of the aesthetic form of male affection in war. I do not want to claim that the soldiers Hetherington photographed were directly influenced by this or that film—although it is probable.¹⁶ My aim, rather, is to highlight how seemingly raw and authentic bodily gestures are always situated within broader cultural/aesthetic frames. Moreover, I aim to show how bodily gestures—and the existential yearnings these gestures express—point to and manifest a set of underlying aesthetic influences. This hermeneutic logic will be explored further through the themes discussed in the following sections.

FIGURE 2 (from left to right) Ridley Scott (2001) Black Hawk Down; Robert Zemeckis (1994) Forrest Gump; Ben Stiller (2008) Tropic Thunder.

The professional soldier

Another existential ideal embodied by American soldiers which Hetherington captured was that of military professionalism. To understand the hermeneutic significance of this theme, both culturally/historically and aesthetically, it will be necessary to begin by briefly situating it in historical perspective. Cultural historians have documented extensively how military culture evolves dialectically with broader society. The trend in Western society towards Romantic and Enlightenment principles which emphasised individual autonomy (see Taylor 1992), for instance, occurred alongside the ‘rise of the common soldier’ within Europe’s citizen armies (Harari 2008: 160). This trend is reflected in artistic depictions of war. In his seminal study of European war art, for example, Peter Paret (1997) notes how the common soldier was elevated from the background to centre frame, displacing the idealized General. The ‘common soldier’, as such, was no longer ‘merely a cog in the military machine’ but came to be treated artistically—and by implication, culturally and politically—as an autonomous and thinking being (Paret 1997: 25; 59–113). In the post-Second World War period in the West, this elevated ‘common soldier’ then gradually evolved into the ‘professional soldier’ as European societies professionalized and as Europe’s citizen armies have been replaced by smaller, more highly trained, and technologized militaries populated by paid volunteers (King 2013: 208, Cf. Janowitz 1960, Huntington 1981). In their own self-image as well as in popular culture, therefore, the regular combat soldier is no longer a pawn moved around by generals, nor primarily the hero of the nation, but rather a highly trained individual who embodies responsibility and moral purpose and acts on their own initiative.

This ideal of military professionalism is reflected extensively in popular artistic representations. In Hollywood movies such as American Sniper, The Hurt Locker, or Shooter, for example, the individuality, expertise, and responsibility of the low-ranking soldier are aesthetically celebrated. A pertinent example of this fetishization of professionalism is The Unit (Mamet 2006), a popular action-drama television series which documents the heroic exploits of an American special forces military unit. The show is essentially a glorification of the professional soldier, the epitome of which is represented as the special forces operator. The show’s hero is Sergeant Major Jonas Blane (Figure 3), a non-commissioned officer who is characterized as making the most critical decisions (his Commanding Officer, a colonel, meanwhile, is characterized as a sleazy bureaucrat—indeed, Jonas jokes that he takes his orders directly from the President). Although of course an idiosyncratic production, shows such as The Unit exploit and belong to a broader genre of representing soldiering as a professional ideal.

FIGURE 3 David Mamet (2006) The Unit, season 1, episode 2.

Hetherington captured the aesthetic ideal of professionalism explicitly and succinctly in many of his photographs. Figure 4, for example, is a photograph of American soldiers conducting orders at their Korengal outpost. If we look closely at the photograph, we can see that every gesture of the soldiers, down to the smallest detail, discloses an existential ideal of professionalism—from the left hand of the soldier in the middle-right which causally but readily holds his helmet, to the facial expression of the soldier on the middle-left which expresses an autonomous thoughtfulness about the orders being received. These soldiers are poised to autonomously execute their commands. At a more macro level of analysis, the culture of professionalism dominates the structure of the whole frame: The soldiers’ bodily gestures emanate competence, experience, and self-control—all virtues of professionalism. Furthermore, the soldiers embody the autonomy and moral responsibility characteristic of the professional soldier such that they are not simply cogs in the military machine but individuals—revealed also by ‘authentic’ breaches of uniformity—who orchestrate the war at the ground level, giving and complying with the tactical orders which make strategic and political agendas possible. Indeed, it seems that soldiering for these men is not simply a profession but a vocation and even a passion.¹⁷

FIGURE 4 Tim Hetherington (2010), US army soldiers, Afghanistan. © Imperial War Museum, DC 49134_1.

My argument is that the aesthetic continuity we observe from Hollywood war to real war is established in the existential commitments made by ‘impressionable' young men seeking to become soldiers in accordance with societally established ideals—in this case, with that of the professional soldier. The men captured in Figure 4 have understood this ideal and are creatively and authentically embodying and re-enacting it.¹⁸ Their gestures therefore stand on the cusp of time, simultaneously pointing forward in their creative self-fashioning and pointing backward to the aesthetic legacy of their ‘authentic’ performances.

Indeed, what is striking about Figure 4 is the sincerity and authenticity of the act it captures. As viewers, we are struck by the zeal and credibility of the performance and with the way we (including the photographer) are positioned as mere observers. In this sense, a significant contrast emerges between this photograph and Figure 1. While the soldier in Figure 1 performs explicitly for the camera (and the camera, as such, serves as an essential Other through whom the soldier understands himself and becomes what he is), here, the soldiers’ bodily gestures seem to triumphantly say ‘We already are professional soldiers!’. Of course, we can critically assess the photographic situation and imagine the soldiers being acutely conscious of the presence of the camera. But in this case, the determination to ignore the camera is further indicative of authenticity, or at least the desire to be authentic. We are supposed to believe that these men really are what they are pretending to be. These men are now authentic bearers of the ideal, ready to lend their form to the next generation of artistic representations, thereby completing the cycle of the feedback loop.

The absurdity of war

My premise for this final theme is that war—according to ‘healthy’ moral and aesthetic judgement—is an Absurd phenomenon which challenges powers of comprehension. I use the term ‘Absurd’ here in a phenomenological sense to describe that which tends towards the negation of human meaning (Heidegger 1927: 193[152]).¹⁹ One way in which this absurdity is manifest is in the way war challenges and disrupts methods of artistic representation. The most famous modern example of this—and one which particularly reveals the absurdity of war—is the shift in aesthetic modes which occurred during and after the First World War (Brandon 2007: 2, Bourke 2017: 28, Michalski 2017: 79). Here, grotesque and surreal abstractions were newly employed to capture what was perceived as the senselessness of reality (as epitomized in works by artists such as Paul Nash and Otto Dix). To be sure, war is often depicted straightforwardly, in a morally and aesthetically unambiguous fashion—as is particularly the case, for example, in many Hollywood movies. Notwithstanding such moral simplifications, however, my contention is that war poses challenges to artistic interpretation due to the fact that it disrupts aesthetic forms and the aesthetic meaning which undergirds them.

As Kate McLoughlin explores in her examination of literary representation of war, one way to (paradoxically) make sense of the absurdity of war is through irony and humour (McLoughlin 2011: 188). In a certain kind of laughter, McLoughlin argues, we can ‘feel the truth that war, or at least some aspects of it, is beyond rational comprehension’ (McLoughlin 2011: 188).²⁰ One relatively recent and influential example of this irony in the face of the Absurd is Francis Coppola’s (1979) Vietnam war movie, Apocalypse Now. In this representation of war, the ‘horror’—which, considering it is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s (1899) Heart of Darkness, is the moral of the story—is artistically side-lined (until the last scenes at least), and instead the viewer is presented with a series of ridiculous and perverted ironies. The insanity, as one reviewer observed, is endemic (Wilmington 1988: 287). Figure 5, for example, shows the commanding officer of a beach landing (topless, on the right with the slouch hat) completely indifferent both to the horror of the situation and to his military command, being preoccupied instead with how and when he is going to surf the ‘six-foot waves [which] break both ways’ on the beach he is attacking. To borrow McLoughlin (2011: 168) phrase, this representation of war evokes a mirthless and nihilistic laughter; and it is this humour—more than the grotesque or the surreal (both of which are also present)—which best represents the absurdity of war.²¹

FIGURE 5 Francis Coppola (1979) Apocalypse Now.

How do such representations of war influence the contemporary generation of warriors? In his photographs in Afghanistan, Hetherington offers several examples of how the Absurd is aesthetically expressed and embodied by American soldiers. It is an expression of irony, for instance, that in front of pin-up posters of naked women are placed sticky fly traps littered with corpses (Hetherington 2010: 77;84)—perhaps to contrast frustrated fantasies with everyday realities. Moreover, the title of Hetherington’s book itself represents an Absurd irony: ‘Infidel’ was how the enemy would refer to American soldiers over their radio communications, and it is what some soldiers would get tattooed on prominent parts of their bodies (e.g. Hetherington 2010: 35).²² For the American soldiers, however, the enemy did not realize that ‘God hates us all forever’—as the soldiers wrote on a sign in their accommodation (Hetherington 2010: 71, my emphasis).²³ Although perhaps not a dominant sentiment (in relation to their enthusiasm for the war), this nihilism points to a sense these soldiers had of the absurdity of war in general and of their war in particular.

To my mind, this nihilistic sentiment is succinctly stated through the soldier’s bodily gesture in Figure 6. According to the Imperial War Museum’s (2022b) object description, the soldier is screaming after being ‘blooded’. The soldier’s bodily gesture, however, seems somewhat contrived—as if he wanted to ‘say’ something more to the camera. What, then, does his body ‘say’? In one sense, he is captured embodying the essence of Christian sacrifice—he is ‘living to die’, as the tattoo on his arm states. His facial gesture, meanwhile, is ambiguous, perhaps somewhere between a grim laugh and a maniacal passion. Overall, however, I want to suggest that his whole bodily gesture reflects an Absurd existential milieu. War, apparently, cannot be made sense of through the repertoire of ‘normal’ bodily gestures, so he just screams at the camera some raw and incomprehensible range of emotion. Ultimately, I believe, this expression directs us towards the senselessness of his lived experiences.

FIGURE 6 Tim Hetherington (2008), US army soldier, Afghanistan. © Imperial War Museum, DC 66135.

To the extent that Coppola’s Apocalypse Now has influenced contemporary American soldiers, then his critique of war has been lost on them. Far from disclosing war as a senseless endeavour, the aesthetic ideal of the Absurd is paradoxically embodied and enacted, serving to perpetuate that which it seeks to undermine (a similar irony is manifest in how contemporary British soldiers embody the disillusionment culture of the First World War (Gilks 2023)). This irony highlights an important feature of aesthetic influence, namely that contemporary aesthetic themes seldom have straight or clean lineages, but are often rooted in seemingly antithetical notions. As Nietzsche (1887) showed in his genealogy of morals, noble ideals can have bloody histories (Cf. Geuss 1994); and likewise, bloody practices might have noble origins—as I am suggesting is the case here when an intended critique of war motivates that which it seeks to undermine. In its ownmost absurdity, therefore, the Absurd highlights the existential possibility of ‘taking up’ and reconciling paradox within one’s existential project, of being from nothingness (to use Sartrean language), of negating nihilism by performing it. The soldier’s embrace of the Absurd, as such, underscores the sheer existential potential of aesthetic influence.

Conclusion

So many of the photographs Hetherington took whilst embedded with American troops in Afghanistan were of soldiers sleeping, evoking a defencelessness, boyishness, and innocence not commonly associated with warriors.²⁴ These photographs are striking in part because they are so unconventional; and we might rightly question Hetherington’s artistic motive. To my mind, the artistic effect of these photographs becomes clear once they are hermeneutically situated, in their con-textual setting: They provide a stark contrast with the soldiers’ wakeful bodily gestures. Indeed, it is through a juxtaposition with these slumbering bodies—in some cases reminiscent more of death than life²⁵—that we see how highly curated the performance of self is for these soldiers. Their bodily gestures are not ‘natural’ or timeless but signify (i.e. point to) a particular aesthetic-historical circumstance. This is what is implied in Hetherington’s notion of a feedback loop and what—in the words of James Brabazon—he sought to ‘visually explain’ in his combat photography. Hetherington’s artistic genius, I believe, was to convey this intuition through the still image of the soldier’s body.

In this paper, I have offered a theoretical framework to understand this phenomenon. I have tried to show that the soldiers’ bodily gestures should be hermeneutically contextualized within broader aesthetic frames and that, as such, they can be interpreted as historically contingent performances. Ontologically, this was aided by a conceptualization of the underlying currents of aesthetic meaning which bind representations and realities of war and which thereby establish historical continuity within what Gadamer calls a hermeneutic universe. Through this framework, moreover, I argued that aesthetic continuity is ultimately contingent on the soldier’s ‘taking up’—understanding, embodying, performing, re-enacting—the aesthetic frames of war which are ‘handed down’; and that there is, as Merleau-Ponty argued, an essential agency at the core of historical continuity. From this perspective, the combat photograph acquires a new validity: It (potentially) discloses both the historical structure of war and the structure of being-in-war; it teaches us, plainly, what it is like to be a soldier.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors of the Tim Hetherington Network special issue to which this article belongs—especially Greg Brockett at the Imperial War Museum for facilitating access to Tim Hetherington’s personal diaries, and Sarah Maltby for instructive feedback on a draft. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mark Gilks

Mark Gilks has recently completed a PhD in International Conflict Analysis at the University of Kent’s Brussels School of International Studies. Prior to this, he completed degrees in philosophy and politics at the universities of St Andrews and Oxford. His previous work has been published in both philosophy and social science journals, including The British Journal of Aesthetics, Social Epistemology, Critical Military Studies, and Critical Studies on Terrorism.

Notes

1 Citation taken from Hetherington’s personal diaries which were accessed through the Imperial War Museum, London. Hereafter: diaries.

2 Besides his ‘visual explanations’ of the feedback loop, I have been unable to find any written references by Hetherington himself to this notion; and external references to it seem to be based on personal correspondence that colleagues/friends had with Hetherington leading up to his death (see, e.g., Hetherington’s biography by Huffman (2013: 116; 123; 125; 127)). Neither did I find any direct reference to the feedback loop in Hetherington’s personal diaries.

3 Following Gadamer’s claim that aesthetic experience ‘is not just one kind of experience among others, but represents the essence of experience per se’ (Gadamer 1960: 60), I focus in this paper on the category of ‘art’ and the way its meanings influence the viewer/reader. I believe the theory developed below would equally apply to the broader category of media.

4 Although my explanatory focus in this paper is specifically on how art influences reality, the notion of a feedback loop also encompasses, in turn, the influences reality has on art.

5 As Burgoyne and Rositzka (2015) have insightfully shown, Hetherington and his work was not outside of the feedback loops he sought to capture and represent. In this paper, however, I take this critical perspective for granted and attempt to interpret the artistic merit of Hetherington’s work itself. While Burgoyne and Rositzka explore ‘the way the genres of war film and photography carry the imprint of the historical period in which they first emerged’ (Burgoyne and Rositzka 2015: 2), I seek to explain how the represented subjects—whether actors or real soldiers—perform and embody these genres in relation to the camera.

6 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term was initially used in astrological and theological contexts.

7 The basic problem of this Cartesian distinction is to account for how the mind causally relates to the body. As a phenomenologist, however, Merleau-Ponty’s critique is not based on the insolubility of the problem, but rather on the evidence offered by a ‘naïve consciousness’ to which phenomenology must return (Merleau-Ponty 1945: lxx; Cf. Husserl 1900: 1:168). ‘Naïve consciousness’, Merleau-Ponty argues, offers no evidence for such a distinction (Merleau-Ponty 1942: 188).

8 The notion of being ‘impressed’ is problematic for the same reason that ‘influence’ is: It characterises the human being as a mould which is passively shaped by some external force and design.

9 There is no necessary contradiction between Gadamer’s emphasis on language and Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on embodied understanding; the latter, rather, simply emphasises that language occurs in and through bodily expression. Indeed, both would agree that—in Merleau-Ponty’s words—‘speech accomplishes thought’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 183).

10 Ontologically, this argument implies that aesthetic meaning is contingent on the human body—that the body is, essentially, the primordial work of art from which all ‘artworks’ derive. This ontological observation underscores how it is the body’s expressive potential which produces the artwork’s expressiveness. Aesthetic meaning must therefore not be hypostatised as an exogenous force but rather understood as something which emanates from human creativity (Gilks 2021a).

11 I focus here on Hetherington’s (2010) Infidel, his published ‘portrait’ of his time embedded with a US platoon in the Korengal Valley, Afghanistan. See also his video installation on Sleeping Soldiers (Hetherington 2009) and the posthumous exhibition of his work organised by Liverpool’s Open Eye Gallery, entitled Tim Hetherington: You Never See Them Like This (2013). Among other awards, Hetherington won the 2008 World Press Photo of the Year for his photograph of an exhausted American soldier.

12 Although this point cannot be argued for here, I believe there was something ethnographic about Hetherington’s focus on these three themes—that these themes reflect dominant cultural aspects of contemporary American military life.

13 For a detailed written account of the phenomenon of ‘bloodings’ in the same context, see Sebastian Junger’s War (2010: 23). This particular ‘macho shit’ is extensively reflected in popular culture about war, particularly in Hollywood war movies. In Jarhead (Mendes 2005), a film based on a (2003) Gulf War memoir by Anthony Swofford, for example, the protagonist is beaten in the opening scenes by members of the platoon to which he is assigned upon passing out of basic training—although he is not branded with his unit insignia, a right he must ‘earn’ (Cf. Swofford 2003: 51). Another notable example is Full Metal Jacket, when protagonist Private Lawrence (‘Pyle’) is given a ‘blanket party’ (beaten in his bed) by other members of his platoon.

14 According to Sartre (1943), the Other plays a fundamental existential role in self-understanding because it is only through the other’s objectifying gaze that we can, in turn, objectify ourselves and thereby understand ourselves as concretely possessing a certain social identity.

15 For an examination of modern representations of this theme in American culture, see Eberwein (2007).

16 For a discussion of how masculinity in Hollywood war movies influences young men in an American, television-centred culture, see Ralph Donald (2001: 170, Cf. Donald and MacDonald 2011).

17 As Anthony King (2013: 219) observes, professionalism in this context leads paradoxically to amateurism (in the etymological sense of the word) because professional soldiers come to be motivated not so much by pay but by the love of their ‘profession’.

18 I use ‘impressionable’ here in a non-pejorative sense; to be impressionable, in a Gadamerian sense (although I do not believe he uses this term), is to let the currents of history flow through one’s being, to freely ‘take up’ what is ‘handed down’. On the notion of re-enacting history, see Collingwood (1945: 282).

19 I do not want to make a pacifist claim here that war is ontologically meaningless—since besides the fact that war must be understood as generative as well as destructive (Barkawi and Brighton 2011), war is—by implication of my argument—an essentially meaningful activity for the fervently involved. My claim, rather, is that there exists a powerful aesthetic current—rooted to some degree in political pessimism, but also in ‘naïve’ (i.e., unprejudiced) judgement—to perceive war as a senseless activity which undermines its own ends; and even where those ends are understood as morally or politically justified, war can still be perceived as a condemnation of humanity.

20 McLoughlin offers several literary examples of this phenomenon, including, for example, Joseph Heller’s (1961) Catch-22. It is worth noting that, in her analysis, McLoughlin also regards war as essentially an ‘ineffable and intractable’ phenomenon which ‘resists depiction […] in multifarious ways’ (McLoughlin 2011: 8; 6–7).

21 A classic example of representing the absurdity of war through humour in the British context is Blackadder Goes Forth, a sitcom set during World War One. Again, the horror of war is side-lined until the last scene.

22 Photograph available at: https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205738913.

23 Photograph available at: https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205755788. Cf. Camus (1942: 42), who suggests that ‘the absurd is sin without God’.

24 See, for example: https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205738904; and: https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205738905.

25 See, for example: https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205564241.