In this essay I explore two distinct cultural framings of war in the twenty-first century – an emerging theory centred on the doctrine of bodiless or ‘post-heroic war’, and an evolving artistic and critical interest in what one writer calls the ‘corpography’ of war (Luttwak 1995; Gregory 2015). Two projects serve as my examples: the video installation Images of War (at a Distance) (2011) by Harun Farocki, and the documentary Restrepo (2010), along with the accompanying book of photographs entitled Infidel (2010), by the photographer Tim Hetherington and the writer Sebastian Junger. The work of these three artists captures the competing cultural imaginaries that have formed around war today – the fascination with war conducted at a distance, so called ‘wired war’ or ‘surgical war’, calibrated for low risk and maximum potency, and its shadow double, the theatre of high drama and corporeal tragedy viewed close at hand in the work of Hetherington and Junger. Both projects have attained high levels of cultural visibility. Viewed in isolation, each is fully coherent – and entirely inadequate. Seen together, they convey the contending constructions of war that have taken hold in Western culture today.

The polarised concepts of war presented in these works underscore the challenge of representing the pervasive violence of the current period, where new weapons and entirely new cultures of war, extending from the warped medievalism of ISIS to the remote weaponry of drone warfare, seem to confound the power of representation. Ranging from the sanguinary spectacles of terror seen in media events produced by ISIS to the nearly invisible, cybernetic weaponry of wired war, the new wars of the twenty-first century challenge us for a new symbolic treatment. The question Fredric Jameson posed in a 2008 essay, is war representable? (my paraphrase) has even greater salience today, as the proliferation of media images of conflict and carnage has exposed a corresponding narrative void, an absent metalanguage for war that could orient or map the contours of conflict in the contemporary moment (Jameson 2009: 1533). Marked by an extraordinary amplification of media imagery on the one hand, and by a radically diminished quality of narrative expression on the other, contemporary war, for all its stunning ubiquity, seems somehow to escape effective symbolic representation.