Ann Marlowe

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/plain-sight

Dazzled and Deceived

Mimicry and Camouflage
by Peter Forbes
Yale, 304 pp., $27.50

When I began Dazzled and Deceived I was disappointed to see that I’d have to read five chapters on mimicry in the natural world before I got to my particular interest, military camouflage in the First and Second World Wars. Five chapters on insects? What motivated me to pick up Dazzled was the question of why the world’s militaries rather suddenly developed an interest in disguising themselves around the time of World War I.

But I found myself caught up in British nature writer (and poetry editor) Peter Forbes’s account of the late 19th-century fascination with mimicry and the way it influenced Darwin’s theory of natural selection. The late 19th century was the golden age of mimicry, and some imitative species discovered in the early 19th century, like living stone plants, received more attention a hundred years later.

Are there reasons beyond biology why this might be so? I wish Forbes had pushed harder to tease out the intellectual history and cultural context in which interest in mimicry came to the fore. Perhaps part of the answer is the invention of photography and the divergence of painting from pure representation? But Forbes, the author of The Gecko’s Foot (2005), is more interested in nature. He explains how mimicry raised the ultimate philosophical questions in Victorian biology: What are variations, hybrids, and species? What is the role of warning coloration versus sexual selection in evolution? Occasional mutations of harmless butterflies that looked like neighboring toxic species were favored by natural selection, and eventually evolved into distinct mimic species. In some places, several different toxic species all looked alike.

In many cases, good explanations had to await the discovery of DNA. Some mysteries are still being unraveled. I never knew, for instance, that insects see beyond the color spectrum we can see, all the way to the ultraviolet. In ultraviolet light, the Australian white crab spider is highly visible to bees, and flowers where it perches seem more brilliant and enticing. But local bees are catching on to the game and avoiding super-white flowers. That’s evolution in action. Or consider that mimetic butterflies inherit a mating preference for others who look like them. The spinning-out of this particular story raises fundamental issues about what a species is.
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Forbes has convinced me that, without a grounding in the natural origins of human-designed camouflage, I’d have a superficial understanding of the intellectual history of this aspect of warfare. Knowing that concealment strategies in nature were all the rage in late 19th-century biology, it’s not surprising to learn that several thinkers simultaneously came up with the idea of disguising ships from attack. More interesting still, the strategies these men advocated for ship camouflage often derived from their theories about how concealment worked in nature.

The most important camoufleur was a puritanical, obsessive New England painter, Abbott Handerson Thayer. The eponymous Thayer’s Law refers to countershading, “the gradation between the back and the belly of an animal.” Thayer saw countershading everywhere in nature, and warning coloration nowhere, which influenced his military ideas. When the Spanish-American War began in 1898, he advised the Navy on disguising ships (although it wasn’t done), and in 1902, he patented the idea of applying countershading—upward facing parts darker, downward facing parts white—to naval vessels. Thayer also identified what would come to be known as disruptive coloration, which was applied in World War I as “dazzle” painting.

As Forbes explains disruptive coloration:

By breaking the shape of the creature into large, seemingly random patches of colour, the characteristic outline of the creature can to some extent be obscured. As humans are large creatures, and their artifacts often larger still, this principle is more important in human camouflage than attempts at total invisibility.

The Scottish zoologist John Graham Kerr had noticed in 1895 that the then-standard battleship gray for ships “falls short of what is attained by nature” by way of disguise. In September 1914 he wrote to Winston Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty, about his method for disguising ships, and his ideas were considered—but eventually the navy decided that gray was still the best option given the varying times of day, degrees of light, and times of year with which ships must contend.

A third figure, an English marine painter named Norman Wilkinson, apparently without knowledge of camouflage in nature, also advocated breaking up the outline of ships by painting them in black and white stripes. A lifelong sailor, he’d joined the Royal Navy at the outbreak of World War I and, by 1917, was bitten by the “dazzle” bug as well.

Each had slightly different goals: Wilkinson hoped to make ships harder to hit by torpedos when sighted by submarines; Kerr thought in terms of avoiding gun attack; Thayer thought white made ships nearly invisible (or made icebergs invisible at night, as the Titanic crew discovered). These goals would be debated after the war, when Kerr and Wilkinson competed to be known as the originator of dazzle; but it was Norman Wilkinson, charismatic and socially skilled, who was tasked by the navy to set up a camo unit.

One of the painters Wilkinson recruited was Edward Wadsworth, a British vorticist. I happened to see two of his black-and-white World War I-era woodcuts of dazzle ships (“Dock Scene” and “Liverpool Shipping”) in an exhibit in Miami’s Wolfsonian Museum while reading Forbes’s book and was struck by the way dazzle seemed so dated, so of its time. Exuberant Vorticist evocations of what then was experienced as modernity, they are now as obviously picturesque as Canalettos.

Forbes is clear that dazzle was almost as much a cultural artifact as a useful military tactic. Ship camouflage didn’t turn out to be very effective: In a Royal Navy study of the 2,367 ships that were painted with dazzle, it was found that more were attacked and more lost or damaged, but slightly fewer of these were sunk. So the usefulness of dazzle was inconclusive, although an American study of 1,256 camouflaged ships showed slightly better results for dazzle. But then, as the Israeli military theorist Martin van Creveld puts it, “In any particular kind of war, the meaning of ‘victory’ is decided as much by convention—tacit or explicit—as it is by actual physical results.”

By the time of the Great War, camouflage was in the zeitgeist—whether or not it worked. Forbes points out the “connection between disruptive coloration and cubism’s breaking up of the outline into facets.” But Thayer, Wilkinson, and Kerr, at least in Forbes’s account, made nothing of it. It was Picasso, in Gertrude Stein’s famous testimony, who noted the link, reacting to a camouflaged truck in Paris at the start of the war by claiming, “Yes it is we who made it, that is cubism.”

Forbes also makes a novel point about cubism and camouflage:

The tendency towards colour for colour’s sake, so notable in many of these [avant-garde] movements, was reversed in cubism. The palette was, more or less entirely, muddy greens and browns—earth colours, camouflage colours.

Interestingly enough, while ships and gun emplacements were painted with camouflage or disruptive designs, only snipers wore camo in World War I
and the general run of combatants were not garbed in camo, even in World War II. (Part of the reason is that it was hard to mass-produce.) Abbott Thayer was an early proponent of disguising military uniforms, harassing the War Office on the subject; but the snipers’ uniforms worn after 1916 were derived from Scottish deerstalkers’ gillies!

Oddly enough, Forbes doesn’t cite a 2002 book by Roy Behrens, False Colors: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage. Behrens discusses the use of camo in the two World Wars, with profuse illustrations and some fascinating discussions of modern art that go beyond Forbes’s examples.

Mimicry in flora and fauna may be innately fascinating to humans because we are mimics from babyhood. And mimicry is related to mimesis, representation, the source of all human communication, art, and learning. Louis Menand wrote recently that “[Marcel] Duchamp eliminated the element of imitation in art, and [Andy] Warhol imitated him.” It’s an insight that resonates more fully after reading Dazzled and Deceived.

 http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/017/140fzwgq.asp

The Birth (and Death) of the Cool
By Ted Gioia

Reading Ted Gioia’s dust-jacket credits (“Best-selling author of The History of Jazz and Delta Blues”), readers may think this book is about jazz or pop culture. It is–and Gioia has written an intellectually precise, lively, and imaginative account of “the cool” and its role in American life. But even Gioia may not realize that he has offered up a tangential illumination of the whole phenomenon of modernity:

Starting in the fifties and gaining momentum over the next two decades, average people wanted to lead their lives as though they were works of art, songs or movies or novels. At the same time, people now judged songs or movies or novels as lifestyle accessories, not as aesthetic products. In some strange way, this became the epitome of the cool–to externalize your life as though it were one more entertainment product.

This rehearses the argument of the whole book, including the “death of the cool,” which he attributes to the eventual sickening commercialization of the concept. From now on, he argues, we are in for earnestness, authenticity, and an absence of irony.

Where did “the cool” come from? Gioia’s answer is no surprise: from African Americans. Cool was first defined in print in 1947, in a book titled piquantly Jive and Slang of Students in Negro Colleges. It meant “neatly dressed,” and a “cool papa” was a “nonchalant fellow.”

Unsurprisingly, Gioia, the author of five books on the subject, leans heavily on jazz in explaining cool. Almost 40 pages are devoted to discussing the roles of Bix Beiderbecke, Lester Young, and Miles Davis in the construction of cool, and much of this is gloriously written criticism. A few representatively brilliant asides: Gioia looks at Method acting as a sort of stage jazz, and riffs on the fact that Bugs Bunny, Fred Flintstone, and the Pink Panther had jazz themes despite the fact that jazz record sales were minuscule.

The strength of this study is that Gioia’s theorizing rests on specific examples drawn from his magisterial knowledge of jazz. That is also its weakness. Gioia may underestimate the degree to which film fed the aestheticization of everyday life, and starting long before the 1950s. Gioia would also have deepened his analysis by looking at 19th-century intellectual history. The ability to “externalize” one’s view of one’s life arose in the late 19th century. There is Nietzsche, who wrote about looking at art from the perspective of life in The Birth of Tragedy, and the aesthetes, decadents, and dandies of the fin de siecle.

Gioia might also have written more about when bohemia arose, and why, and why it seems increasingly fragile, though not so fragile as “the cool.” He pays so much attention to jazz that he slights the role of bohemia, including the WASP bohemia of early 20th-century Greenwich Village, in forming “the cool.”

Then there is the role of Jews, also soft-pedaled here. Gioia includes “blacks, gays, jazz musicians, street toughs, bohemians, and countercultural figures of all types” as role models for cool–but not Jews. This, too, would be investigated best by going back to the 19th century, where Jews first appeared as “cool” figures in novels (Daniel Deronda, Proust), politics (Benjamin Disraeli), and society. The aura of the demonic and outcast that clung to them would also be part of the aesthetic of cool.

But these are quibbles; Ted Gioia has not written a definitive work of intellectual history but an extended essay on a phenomenon that draws on his own field of expertise. And he has hit upon the one essential point: He writes that the cool “eventually boiled down to how one was perceived by others. Coolness, even more than beauty, is inevitably in the eye of the beholder.”

This is a remarkable insight into all of modernity, not just “the cool,” and I would go further and say that this emphasis on the eye of the beholder was a necessary precondition for cool. Cool was unthinkable until there was a fashion for what Nietzsche called perspectival thinking in the Will to Power.

Loosely, this means regarding reality as lying mainly in the eye of the beholder rather than being fixed, immutable, and objectively given. Once this makes sense, then it also makes sense to dress, live, and act “as if” you were whatever you want to be. In 1400 it made no sense to dress as a peasant if you were a noble, or vice versa, because reality most definitely did not lie in the eye of the beholder. It was part of a permanent social order established by God.

But sometime in the late 19th century it began to make sense to dress “as if” one were what one wanted to be–and this continues to make sense. Cool is part of a larger phenomenon of what might be called perspectival culture. Once reality lay in the eye of the beholder, conceptual art and Abstract Expressionism and happenings and performance art made sense. Some of these works’ main purpose, in fact, was to draw our attention to the fact that they were art only if we agreed that they were–for instance, musical pieces like one of John Cage’s, 4’33″, which consisted solely of silence.

I have argued elsewhere that modern counterinsurgency theory only became possible once people in the military, too, saw that the reality of the battle space depended on perceptions (in this case, that of the population). If the population doesn’t think you’re doing counterinsurgency, you’re not.

Perspectival culture extends into far less lofty domains like sports, d cor, and fashion. Gioia notes, but doesn’t comment on the fact, that the skateboard was invented in 1958. Why not in 1760, like the roller skate? (Granted, skates were not widely used until more than a hundred years later, when improved to make turning easier, and when there were more paved roads.) I would argue that it took a certain view of the urban landscape, as a place to play, to make anyone want to do the things people do with skateboards.

“By 1979,” Gioia explains, “the whole culture had gone cool.” And so, of course, cool began to lose its allure. We are in for a “decooling” of society, the result of an oversaturation of cool. “Cool is increasingly just cultural noise,” writes Gioia, and marketers will try to make the slick into the authentic to grab us. The “core postcool values of simplicity, authenticity, naturalness, and earnestness” are upon us. But Gioia should distinguish this change, which is merely stylistic, from the larger change signified by the culture of cool he analyzes.

The idea that reality is whatever it is perceived to be, rather than something with independent existence, is likely to be with us as long as our culture survives. This is a good thing, too. The radical subjectivism which gave birth to contemporary art and to counterinsurgency theory has also given us cultural relativism and a loss of confidence in Western values. But the skepticism inherent in perspectival culture will not be the destruction, but the saving, of Western civilization. Poseurs and, especially, their commercialization may be annoying, but they don’t blow up airplanes or commit suicide bombings. It takes a belief in the objective reality of one’s beliefs to produce fanaticism.