Читать книгу Governing from the Skies - Thomas Hippler - Страница 10

The news brutally interrupted the lethargy of the three holiday-makers. They found it exceptionally hard to make sense of the notice written in Italian and published in a local newspaper, the Sentinella Bresciana: an aviation rally very close by, on the other side of the lake. The world’s most famous airmen were to come and exhibit their flying machines. Franz’s excitement was contagious. The three friends, who were staying on the Austrian side, decided to travel by boat to Desenzano and then take the train to Brescia, on the Italian side of the frontier. Arriving in the afternoon, they spent the night at a shabby hotel. On the morning of 11 September 1909, they finally reached the airfield.

Less than a year after finding work as a jurist with the Bohemian Institute for Workplace Insurance, Franz Kafka was not yet entitled to a paid holiday. He had to convince a doctor friend to supply him with a medical certificate to travel to Riva, on Lake Garda, in the company of his best friend, Max Brod, and his brother Otto. A few weeks before, at the end of July, Max had written a piece on Blériot’s flight across the Channel. As for Kafka, he had recently complained of the difficulties he had in writing and his doubt about his vocation as a writer. This led Max Brod to issue a challenge: each of the three would write a report on the Brescia rally, and they would then choose the best.¹

This rally was a world event of great importance. The town’s hotels were full up, and curious spectators arrived from Rome, Naples, and even abroad. King Victor Emmanuel III was in attendance, and the high aristocracy gathered around his majesty. A number of eminent representatives of the world of culture were likewise present: Gabriele D’Annunzio – nicknamed simply Il Poeta – and the demigod of music, Giacomo Puccini. They had all come to witness the spectacle given by the best aviators of the day: Louis Blériot, Glenn Curtis, Henri Rougier, and Alfred Leblanc, along with a number of Italians, including Guido Moncher, originally from Trentino and thus a subject of the Habsburg emperor, like Kafka and his Prague friends. Moncher, however, ‘wore Italian colours, trusting more in them than in our own’.²

Kafka saw the representatives of official culture as rather pathetic figures: D’Annunzio, ‘short and weakly, dances attendance before the most important men on the committee’, while Puccini showed ‘a nose that one might well call a drinker’s’. As for the aviators, Rougier was ‘a little man with a strange nose’ who had difficulty in calming his nerves; Curtiss tried with difficulty to read his American newspaper, while Blériot’s wife was visibly concerned for her husband. Human and fragile on the ground, the aviators only showed their true qualities once propelled into the air by their machines. ‘Sit[ting] at his levers’, Rougier resembled ‘a great man at his writing desk’, calmly in control of the technology. Blériot, stoically confronting a technical problem that threatened his performance, was transformed once in the air: now ‘One sees his straight body over the wings, his legs are stretched down like a part of the engine’. Henri Rougier, the altitude champion who had reached the height of 190 metres, seemed, at the end of this literary report, ‘so high that you had the impression of his being able to determine his position only in relation to the stars’.

Gabriele D’Annunzio had not come to Brescia simply to shine in society, but also to collect material with a view to his next novel. This prodigious child of Italian literature had become famous in 1889 with his first novel, Il Piacere, inaugurating the decadent style in Italy. Five other successful novels followed until 1900. In the mid-1890s D’Annunzio became acquainted with the work of Nietzsche, and began to combine psychologizing introspection with the theme of the superman. From the start of the new century, however, his creative energy began to decline, and the decadent dandy sought literary subjects suited to the coming new age. This was his mission in Brescia. He persuaded Glenn Curtis and Mario Calderara to take him up in their planes in order to taste the sensations of flight. D’Annunzio emerged transformed by this experience. He had found the subject for his new novel, Forse che sì, forse que no, published the following year, 1910.³

Two plots dovetailed here: the first, anchored in the heritage of D’Annunzio’s decadent period, depicts the complicated relationship that the aviator Paolo Tarsis had with two sisters and their brother, while the second adopted a virile and warlike tone, that of the modern superman.⁴ Tarsis and his friend Giulio Cambiaso had been comrades in the navy. Dreaming only of battle and heroism, they fled from the ‘outward discipline’ imposed on the military in time of peace. They travelled the East in search of adventures, and in Cairo met a French ornithologist, who ‘revealed to them the static sense of three dimensions towards the sky’. Tarsis and Cambiaso then built a light plane in order to join the ‘little aristocracy’ of aviators.⁵

The plot, structured around the antagonism between decadent love and virile friendship, contrasts three pairs of themes. The first two – woman/man and earth/sky – are classic, but the third – cars/planes – is more surprising and resolutely modernist. The tone of the novel is set by the first sentence, shaken by ‘the heroic wind of speed’. In this first scene, Tarsis, in the company of his lover Isabella, drives a car at high speed, ‘imagining himself driving not a steed that grazes the ground but a steed that rises up’.⁶ Attached to the ground and to his woman, the automobilist hero only rises up in his imagination. In order to realize his truly human – and thus superhuman – essence, he has to detach himself from the ground, and by the same token, from women. It is only by flying that man is ‘no longer a man, but Man, man the master of the universe, lord of created things’, as D’Annunzio wrote again in the Paris newspaper Le Matin. Aviation heralded nothing less than ‘a new civilization, a new life’, along with ‘a profound metamorphosis of civic life, whether in peace or in war, in beauty or in domination’.⁷ It represented, therefore, a major stake, not simply in the field of war, and still less in terms of sporting records. It promised to revolutionize the whole of intellectual life, and consequently all social and political life as well – including property rights, frontiers, and border controls. Before long aerial cities would be built:

The republic of the air will banish the evil-doers, parasites, the unwelcome, the whole bad lot of them, and open itself to men of good will. On the threshold the elect will cast off the chrysalis of weight, they will glide and fly.

For us today, accustomed to associating air travel with security checks at airports, long hours of waiting, endemic delays and too narrow seats, all this lyricism seems decidedly out of place. But in the early twentieth century, D’Annunzio only expressed a widely shared sentiment. As far back as 1859, in The Legend of the Centuries, Victor Hugo dreamed of an airship that would free humanity from its ills:

Man finally takes up his sceptre and casts off his stick.

And we see him fly with Newton’s calculus

Mounted on Pindar’s ode …

This vessel, built from numbers and dreams,

Would amaze Shakespeare and ravish Euler.

Aircraft, a true marriage of science and poetry, would realize the realm of mankind, a fully human age.

Suddenly like an eruption of madness and of joy,

When, after six thousand years on the fatal path,

Brusquely undone by the invisible hand,

Gravity, bound to the foot of the human race,

Breaks away, this chain was every chain!

Everything in man takes flight, and furies, hatreds,

Chimeras, force, finally evaporates, ignorance and error,

misery and hunger,

The divine right of kings, the primitive or Jewish gods.

The invention of the celestial ship was not simply a scientific revolution, it was a spiritual event: ‘It bears man to man and spirit to spirit’, even able to ‘shine faith into the eye of Spinoza’.⁸

This was the legacy that the poets of the early twentieth century had to contend with. In another literary register, no longer lyrical but resolutely avant-garde, aviation was also the Futurists’ favourite subject. The most modernist aspects of D’Annunzio already draw on a literature that celebrates the fusion of man with machine, aviation here being the most perfect realization of this. In La nuova arma: la macchina, for example, Mario Morasso sees the machine as a true ‘vital force’, an ‘immense multiplication of life’ that possesses a ‘barbarian soul’.⁹ By fusing with man, it gives birth to ‘a creature half human, half metal tool; a composite monster’. The development of aviation thus has ‘philosophical implications’.¹⁰ These themes would be taken up and systematized by the Futurist movement, founded in 1909 – the same year that Blériot crossed the Channel – with the publication of the ‘Futurist Manifesto’ by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti:

1. We want to sing about the love of danger, about the use of energy and recklessness as common, daily practice.

2. Courage, boldness, and rebellion will be essential elements in our poetry…

9. We wish to glorify war – the sole cleanser of the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive act of the libertarian, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women.

10. We wish to destroy museums, libraries, academies of any sort, and fight against moralism, feminism, and every kind of self-serving cowardice.

11. We shall sing of the great multitudes who are roused up by work, by pleasure, or by rebellion; of the many-hued, many-voiced tides of revolution in our modern capitals; of the pulsating, nightly ardor of arsenals and shipyards, ablaze with their violent electric moons; of railway stations, voraciously devouring smoke-belching serpents; of workshops hanging from the clouds by their twisted threads of smoke; of bridges which, like giant gymnasts, bestride the rivers, flashing in the sunlight like gleaming knives; of intrepid steamships that sniff out the horizon; of broad-breasted locomotives, champing on their wheels like enormous steel horses, bridled with pipes; and of the lissome flight of the airplane, whose propeller flutters like a flag in the wind, seeming to applaud, like a crowd excited.¹¹

It was no accident that this manifesto should end up with a celebration of the aeroplane: aviation constituted a perfect synthesis of all Futurist themes, the contempt for history and attachment to the past, a warlike view of the world, the celebration of technology and speed, ending up with a post-humanist vision of the human body and the machine:

It is necessarily therefore to prepare the imminent and ineluctable identification between man and engine, which will make possible and perfect an incessant exchange of intuition, rhythm, instinct and metallic discipline … We aspire to create a non-human type in whom moral weakness, goodness, emotion and love will be abolished … The non-human and mechanical type, built for an omnipresent speed, will be by nature cruel, omniscient and combative.¹²

Futurism, the first resolutely avant-garde movement, linked the aesthetic and political fields intimately together¹³ with the aim of superseding the human, aviation and the figure of the airman being the prototypes of this. Futurism not only launched into ‘aero-poetry’ and ‘aero-painting’, but also into ‘aero-cuisine’, the promotion of a ‘food adapted to a life ever more aerial and rapid’, involving above all ‘the abolition of pasta, the absurd Italian religion’, since ‘it is on account of eating this that [Italians] grow sceptical, ironic and sentimental’.¹⁴

The year after the publication of this manifesto saw the appearance of another memorable text on ‘the social influences of aviation’. Achille Loria, professor of economics at the University of Turin and editor of a major intellectual periodical, Echi e commenti, was already one of Italy’s leading intellectuals, and would be appointed a senator in 1919.¹⁵ Though almost forgotten today, his name gave rise to Gramsci’s concept of ‘Lorianism’, coined to denote a form of stupidity specific to intellectuals, and of which his article on aviation was the ideal-type:¹⁶ ‘this article is entirely a masterpiece of “oddnesses”’ and, ‘given the hilarious character of its content, suited to becoming a “counter-manual” for a school of formal logic and scientific good sense’.¹⁷

Like D’Annunzio, Loria was convinced that aviation would revolutionize social life, marking the definitive triumph of economic liberalism. Its first victim, protectionism, would succumb ‘when goods fall on us like meteorites’. In this way, aviation would realize human freedom in the full sense: ‘the tie … that binds the worker to capital will disappear … when the worker, reluctant to enter the factory or banished from it, finds an aeroplane or dirigible that will lift him into the air’. But individual morality would also benefit. The rate of criminality in cities and plains is higher than in mountain villages, which proves the moral benefits of altitude. Loria thus recommends the construction of aerial prisons, and ‘we shall then see, under the magic influence of the rarefied atmosphere, the most baleful murderers transformed into gentle and pious meditators’.¹⁸

Given such high stakes as these, it was certainly no longer possible to ‘view aviation as a strange and dangerous game, lacking any practical importance and reserved for acrobats and the mad’, to quote D’Annunzio once more. On the contrary, it set humanity at a crossroads. By its capacity to free him from the hold of gravity, aeronautics could realize man’s true humanity. Technological progress would make him good and benevolent, free, master of himself and the universe. Freed from the weight of earthly phenomena, he could finally realize his spiritual essence. This spiritual and moral idea typical of liberal thought was directly linked with an economic argument, followed by a political one: as humanity would no longer be separated from itself by artificial political borders, men could finally devote themselves to unimpeded global trade. Social conflicts would die down, peace and harmony be established, first of all within one society, then in the whole of the world.

It was not surprising, given this, that the promises of aviation included perpetual peace. Victor Hugo had already formulated this hope. In 1864, from his exile in Guernsey, he wrote an enthusiastic letter to Nadar to congratulate him for his essays on the subject of air travel: ‘Release man. From whom? From his tyrant? Which tyrant? Weight.’¹⁹ Aviation meant

the immediate, absolute, instantaneous, universal suppression of borders, everywhere at once, throughout the world … All border posts are abolished. All separation destroyed … All tyranny with no rationale. It means the disappearance of armies, conflicts, wars, exploitation, subjugation, hatred. It means a colossal peaceful revolution … It means the tremendous release of the human race.²⁰

As early as the 1860s, Hugo already reached the conclusion – by an intellectual argument on the philosophical level and a liberal one on the economic and political levels – that aviation was the bearer of universal peace. He was not alone in investing aviation with this power, nor in falling into this technological lyricism. The French astronomer Camille Flammarion said something very similar: ‘When the conquest of the air is achieved, universal fraternity will be established on earth, true peace will descend from the heaven, castes will finally disappear.’²¹

At the start of the twentieth century, the heroic age of aviation, this conclusion would be reached by a quite different argument. Aviation had the miraculous power to make war impossible, not because it freed men, bringing them together and abolishing borders but, paradoxically, on account of its destructive power.²² The liberal vision of peace was followed by a militarist one. The arrival of flying armies made the art of warfare obsolete: mobilization of men, concentration of troops, marches across the countryside, manoeuvres. At the start of the twentieth century, writers already envisaged the destruction by bombs from the air of industrial centres, capital cities, and military headquarters.

This idea was formulated first of all by Jean de Bloch, a banker and financier of Polish railways, in a book which had tremendous influence, La Guerre future (the book that gave Tsar Nicholas II the idea for an international disarmament conference, leading to the Hague Convention). In Bloch’s well-documented reasoning, the unprecedented increase in firepower had made every kind of classical manoeuvre impossible, inevitably leading to a stabilization on the front. As a consequence, wars would be long, and decided not by victory on the battlefield but by the economic and political collapse of one or more of the warring parties. Bloch was one of the few analysts to foresee the shape of the First World War. Other writers investigated the consequences of aviation for the future of war. In a programmatic work of 1910, La Conquête de l’air et la paix universelle, François Mallet brandished the spectre of the massive destruction of cities. In the face of such a danger, only one outcome was possible: peace, general disarmament, and ‘the solemn reconciliation of peoples as the conclusion’.²³

There was thus, on the one hand, the dream of aviation as bearer of perpetual peace, which, by liberating men and bringing them together, prepared the conditions for true freedom and a fully human realm; while, as the converse of this technological idyll, there were warnings against the destructive power of air war and the conclusion that, given that European nations had by and large the same level of technological development and industrial capacity, war would become steadily less likely as it became more risky. What rational government could take the risk of seeing its cities, its industry, and its infrastructure destroyed by bombing in a single night? War could no longer bring any gain, and governments would necessarily end up understanding this.²⁴ We thus see the beginnings, in the discourse on air war of the early twentieth century, of the future doctrine of ‘deterrence’.²⁵ But whether it emphasized this or indeed the rapprochement of peoples, the thesis of a peace-making aviation became a common subject: in France, Paul Painlevé subscribed to it, as did Thomas Edison in the United States.²⁶ Many examples could be given, but the idea remains the same.

Aviation thus sounded the death-knell of war. Perpetual peace could be seen on the horizon and, where this was not the case, the conditions for its advent must be created. And so, after the liberal peace of rapprochement of peoples and free movement of goods, after the armed peace of mutual deterrence, a third idea of peace came into view: cosmopolitan peace. In 1911, the French airman Clément Ader proposed the formation of an air army against Germany. Revanchist nationalism was already coupled with a republican and universalist note: ‘the law of extension of great states at the expense of small ones, which will follow its natural development towards the unification of peoples. Military aviation will crown this great event. Will it be by liberty or by despotism?’²⁷ Combining liberal peace with peace by deterrence, cosmopolitan peace by aviation sought to draw on federative elements to unify the human race. Taking up the famous expression used by Victor Hugo at the Paris Peace congress of September 1849 that he had chaired,²⁸ the Italian Alessandro Masi held that aviation was drawing the contours of the ‘United States of Europe’.²⁹

How could aviation assure world peace and unite the European peoples? Paradoxically, by its power of destruction and its capacity to strike everywhere without being hindered by political or physical borders. The development of aviation thus revived an old idea that had always obsessed pacifist discourse.³⁰ In the fourteenth century, already, Pierre Dubois, ‘advocate of ecclesiastical causes in the bailiwick of Coutance under Philippe the Fair’, had called for a peace-making European alliance in a programmatic text, De recuperatione terre sancte. In order to establish this peace in Europe, Dubois proposed setting up a council of arbiters, endowed with an executive apparatus that would enable them to deploy against any aggressor a ‘remedium manus militaris, tamquam iusticia neccessario complusiva’.³¹

Henri IV’s famous ‘grand design’ for peace in Europe, which Sully, his main collaborator, speaks of in his Oeconomies Royales, was presented in quite similar terms. The main objective of the ‘grand design’ was to establish an alliance against the hegemony of the house of Habsburg. If it could not be convinced to give up a part of its possessions ‘by the prayers and gentle solicitations of all other potentates of the most-Christian association’, the union would make war on it and subsequently distribute its territories among the conquerors. Once the aspiration of the house of Austria to universal monarchy was broken, a united Christianity would be in a position to make ‘conquests … in the three other parts of the world, that is, Asia, Africa and America’, and above all to ‘sustain a continual war against the infidel enemies of the holy name of Jesus Christ’.³² Later on, such famous pacifists as William Penn³³ and the Abbé de Saint-Pierre would express themselves in very similar terms.³⁴ Closer to our own time, President Theodore Roosevelt, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906, reasserted this classic idea in his Nobel Lecture of 5 May 1910, in which he called for the creation of a world ‘league of peace’. The great difficulty of ensuring a lasting peace ‘arises from the absence of an executive power, a police power capable of applying the decrees’ of an international arbitration body.³⁵ Roosevelt’s speech had a great resonance in international public opinion: to establish peace, an international striking force was needed.³⁶

We can see, then, how aviation gave new life to the old idea of a federative cosmopolitanism endowed with an executive power. Rudyard Kipling, a personal friend of Roosevelt and author of ‘The White Man’s Burden’, was the first to develop the idea of a world government founded on air power. In two short stories, ‘With the Night Mail’ (1905) and ‘As Easy as A.B.C.’ (1912), the latter referring to an international ‘Aerial Board of Control’, a body originating in the technical necessity of regulating air traffic becomes a world technocratic government.³⁷ ‘As Easy as A.B.C.’ tells the story of three airmen required to deal with the problem posed by a group of activists who perform rituals of democratic politics in Chicago in 2065: they assemble, deliver speeches, pass resolutions. Instead of repressing these actions by air power, the ‘Aerial Board of Control’ decides to let them carry on – simply ridiculing them by broadcasting this democratic spectacle directly in a comic programme on London radio.³⁸

This premonitory story shows one of the possible results of liberal-pacifist cosmopolitism. The eradication of war by a post-conflict liberal polity leads directly to a ‘post-democratic’ regime that, despite having the means to repress opposition and contestation in all their forms, prefers to neutralize them without violence.³⁹ Nonetheless, if this is how inoffensive forms of contestation are treated on the hegemon’s own territory, we shall soon see how, in other parts of the world and other political configurations, far less indulgence is shown.

Aviation thus abolishes borders, establishes political freedom and economic liberalism on the world scale; it makes war impossible and proclaims perpetual peace. At the same time, its enormous destructive power calls for a cosmopolitical framework: the possibility to threaten the lives of millions of people cannot be left to any ‘rogue state’. The legitimate use of air power is conditioned by cosmopolitism, i.e., by ‘humanity’, since absolute destruction presupposes an absolute cause: aviation cannot serve to defend a particular interest, it must be the weapon of universalism, and thus of humanity as a whole. A humanity, therefore, of which those who are bombed do not form part. They are nothing more than a disturbance, an obstacle, a virtual nothing. Hence the necessity to dispatch them in practice, as soon as they rise up, to the nothing that they have always been in moral terms.