Balloonomania! Disruptive Technologies,War,and the Amnesia of the Moment

Abstract

Contemporary discussions over emergent and disruptive technologies in military affairs are often framed in futurist and existential terms. The article theorises a distinctive temporal grammar of disruption – one that follows a recursive logic in which the present is extrapolated into an imagined future, which then loops back to legitimise actions in the present. This produces an amnesia of the moment, rendering the disrupted present a virtually time-less category, void of a time-space on which to act. To subvert this temporal grammar, the article suggests studying contemporary technologies by foregrounding their antecedents. It argues that weapons of the past inhabit visions that traverse the partitioning of past, present, and future of battlefield imaginaries, which may be accessed and critically leveraged by thinking through and with such material artefacts’ potentialities, both those that were realised and those that were not. This argument is developed through an archaeological analysis of three moments in the early history of military ballooning: initial launch (1783), use for aerial bombardment (1849), and the first attempts at multilateral regulation (1899/1907).