But what if this distinction between art and war is fatuous, that all along the science of war has been a misnomer, just like the distinction between metaphor and reality? How else to explain the frisson we feel when we come across an ancient Chinese manual of war such as that of Sun Tzu, reeking of the magic of antiquity and Orientalism, and nod our heads in respect? For one of the strangest things about war whether ancient or postmodern is that as a pumped-out, puffed-up “science,” it reeks of craft andwitchcraft, accident and chance, as much as planning. Indeed the more “scientific” or “technological” it appears, the more arcane andmysterious, also. Guerrilla warfare makes this doubly so. Clausewitz is known on account of his equation of politics with war, but is not politics merely the tip of a submerged continent of power whose outlines we dimly discern and whose uncanny force we feel?

To combine a magician, a surrealist painter, and a zoologist, as in the BritishWar Office, is pretty much the mind-set that any of us interested in brushing history against the grain might espouse. So how might one outcamouflage their camouflage? That was John Heartfield’s strategy with photomontage in Berlin around the time Brecht wrote his poem about the anxieties of the regime. Heartfield was a pioneer in the art of photomontage, cutting up images, rearranging the parts, and adding some new ones and a caption so as to reverse the message or expose its hidden meanings. This would be to counteract the macabre artistry of “love beads,” themselves a sardonic transgression of transgression. It is also what Deleuze and Guattari were getting at with their labored notion of the war machine, a machine they saw as the anarchic special ops built into any army, yet antithetical to it.