Military Review English Edition May-June 2016 | Page 25

UNCONVENTIONAL ART

notion of potential (shi), which is implied by that
situation.”21 To the East Asian artist and military
strategist alike, negative space—along with its inherent potential—is necessary to balance positive space
and its defined objects.

Unconventional War is Like
Modern Art
The negative space between war and peace is
where actors are fighting modern wars in unconventional ways, such as activities in the cyber domain by
the Anonymous hackers’ collective.22 Instinctively, the
West focuses on the parts of the whole and desires
substance to fill the negative space.23 East Asian artwork, in contrast, demonstrates a cultural preference
to focus on the whole, recognizing “that action always
occurs in a field of forces.”24
François Julien contrasts Sun Tzu and Carl von
Clausewitz in A Treatise on Efficacy: Between Western
and Chinese Thinking. Julien explains how Sun Tzu
describes war: as water flowing down a mountain, so
military officers are encouraged to learn how to use
the existing conditions of the world, the river’s flow,
to their benefit.25 Julien explains that Clausewitz
describes war as an idea, and Clausewitz encourages
officers to reckon historical analysis against conceptual models to define and set conditions for wars to
be successful.26
The unconventional nature of conflict in the
modern era does not conform to traditional Western
conceptions of war. Sun Tzu’s advocacy of accepting
conditions and working within them, as opposed to
the West’s tradition of defining and setting conditions,
challenges the strategic assumptions of U.S. policy.
Accepting the friction of war as it is, rather than war
as conforming to Western conceptions of war, could
offer considerable insight for U.S. policymakers.
Considering how chaotic the world is, a military planner is a kind of strategic artist painting a
response to volatile, uncertain, chaotic, and ambiguous conflicts. The strategic artist must choose if the
violence, for example, is the center of gravity and
the focal point of the painted response, or if violence is just an object surrounded by negative space.
Principles used in Western artwork imply that the
Western strategic artist will identify centers of
gravity and develop counters to balance systems,
MILITARY REVIEW  May-June 2016

rather than operate inside negative space to “make
the most of the ongoing process.”27

Complexity is Nonlinear
In “Clausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the
Unpredictability of War,” Alan D. Beyerchen applies
principles from modern nonlinear science to show that
war, even as described by Clausewitz, is a nonlinear
system. Following Beyerchen’s premise, negative space
in art, or conflicts that fall outside Western definitions
of war, with their unpredictable potentiality, would
be like the “nonlinear phenomena that have always
abounded in the real world.”28 Nonlinear systems upset
the Western predilection to look for “stable, regular, and
consistent” rules to govern the world since nonlinear,
or complex adaptive systems, “may involve ‘synergistic’
interactions in which the whole is not equal to the sum
of the parts.”29
In many ways, East Asian cultures depict nonlinearity in visual art by using the emptiness of negative
space to imply potential. In contrast, Western artists
instinctively fill negative space with objects or substance that are consistent with the rest of the picture.
The West’s cultural bias to analyze inherently
complex adaptive systems as if they were stable,
regular, and consistent systems is why traditional
Western art emphasizes objects. Western painters
try to balance all objects with other objects within
a specific boundary. In contrast, East Asian painters
try to accept complexity by focusing on the system
as a whole.
Beyerchen identifies the West’s cultural biases,
arguing that even though Clausewitz perceives war
as “a profoundly nonlinear phenomenon,” there is a
desire by the West to define the world through analysis, and “to partition off pieces of the universe to
make them amenable to study.”30 This cultural bias
artificially validates focusing on parts of systems in
isolation of the important links that have a bearing
on the systems as a whole.31 Julien believes that the
West’s cultural biases, such as those summarized
by Beyerchen, are what made it impossible for
Clausewitz to connect his empirical observations of
war with any lasting theory of war.32 Clausewitz understood the West’s cultural bias favoring analysis.
He described the conflict between analysis of parts
and the complexity of the whole as friction.33
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