Lecture 13 - Aesthetic Turn / Popular Culture Flashcards
Aesthetic Turn
Turn to Popular Culture, Arts, Poetry, etc
International Relations Approaches to Popular Culture
popular culture as mirror
popular culture as cause / outcome of world politics
popular culture as constitutive of politcs
popular culture as data
popular culture as mirror
Medium of inspiration for exploring themes/processes in IR and IR theory –> homogenization / hybridization of global culture
Purpose: Pedagogical and analogical
popular culture as cause / outcome of world politics
Diamond ring spurred illict trade with „blood diamonds“ which fueled wars in Africa
outcome / cause of IR –> can spark debates or cause trends
popular culture as constitutive of politics
Determining effects: Knowledge from PC forms base for policies and discursively constructs objects about which we speak
Enabling effects: PC lends strength and legitimacy to policies
Informative effects: PC telling of World Politics; reveals hidden dimension of power
Naturalizing effects: Makes particular way of looking at world to part of natural order
popular culture as data
can be used as data to study certain subjects of IR
The „Visual Turn“ in IR
„We live in a visual age. Images shape international relations and our understanding of them. Images surround everything we do. This omnipresence of images is political and has changed fundamentally how we live and interact in today‘s world
People often perceive and remember key events more through images than through verbal accounts.
Increased Importance of Visuality
Speed at which images circulate
–> social media and digital communication
Democratization of visual politics
–> everyone can post a photo, potentially worldwide
–> proliferation and diversification of images, voices and views
The Power of Images
Images have a special status.
- Generate excitement and anxieties.
- Evoke, appeal to and generate emotions.
- Capture the unimaginable.
images work differently from words.
- Work at numerous overlapping levels.
– Across national levels.
– Between physical and mental world
Difficulties of Studying Images
–> difficult to explain them definitively
–> difficult to capture emotions in response to them
Everyone can read images as opposed to text; though we may end up with different interpretations
Meaning of images vary across time and space
Identity-Politics Explanation
Companies shape how they are perceived and spend considerable efforts to legitimize themselves as acceptable and conventional security actor
