The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory

In the fifteen years since the Millennium special issue on “Images, Narratives and Sounds” scholarship on aesthetic politics has proliferated. Countless inquiries now show how aesthetics is about far more than art: it is about rethinking the fundamental issues that drive global politics. The moment has come to reflect on the contributions of the aesthetic turn and identify potentials and challenges ahead. I do so by stressing that the key is not agenda-setting, but to continue the search for thinking space: to explore ever new ways of writing, seeing, hearing and sensing the political. I then identify two challenges: 1) to push creative work while, at the same time, increasing the ability to speak to a broad audience; 2) to avoid the hubris of overarching explanations and, instead, cultivate pluralism and self-reflexivity. The latter is important to address practices of exclusion, such as those linked to the Western legacy of aesthetic theories.

Oxford Bibliographies, 2018

This article reviews scholarship on aesthetics and world politics, which has grown in volume, sophistication and influence over the past two decades. For at at least two decades scholars have explored how aesthetic sensibilities can help us rethink some of the most serious problems in global politics. An entire new generation of interdisciplinary academics has arisen, pushing the boundaries of how we can understand world politics. They explore different forms of insights, including those that emerge from images, narratives and sounds, such as literature, visual art, music, cinema and other aspects of popular culture. These scholars also show that aesthetics is about far more than art: it is about rethinking the fundamental issues that drive global politics. http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199743292/obo-9780199743292-0236.xml

2009

Is it trivial, or perhaps even irresponsible, to explore aesthetic themes at a time when the world is engulfed by war, genocide, terrorism, poverty, climate change and financial turmoil? Why indulge in painting, poetry or music when lives and livelihoods are at stake? Can we really afford to entertain questions of taste while concrete political action is urgently required? This book offers a passionate but systematically sustained defence of an aesthetic engagement with world politics. It argues that aesthetic sources can offer alternative insight: a type of reflective understanding that emerges not from applying the analytical skills that are central the social sciences, but from cultivating a more open-ended level of creativity and sensibility about the political. We then might be able to appreciate what we otherwise cannot even see: perspectives or people excluded from prevailing purviews, for instance, or the emotional nature and consequences of political events. Drawing on detailed case studies that range from Stalinist Russia to Cold War Germany and contemporary Korea, the author compellingly demonstrates how the poetic imagination can help us understand – and perhaps even shape - some of the most difficult political challenges.

Intermestic: Journal of International Studies

Aesthetic approach to politics is not really something considered as a novelty. Immanuel Kant has described the aesthetic relationship with rationality way back in the 17th century, as well as Friedrich Nietzsche and Jaques Rancier as a more contemporary counterpart. In the field of international relations, the study of aesthetics has been raised by a number of reviewers – from James Der Derian, Costas Constantinou, David Campbell, to Anthony Burke – who began to lay aesthetics as a foothold in approaching various phenomena. Roland Bleiker is one of the most consistent among them. In an essay entitled "The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory", Bleiker opened the discourse to establish aesthetics as one of the paradigms in international political theory. His essay is published in 2001, contrasts with the majority of international political theories that always try to "catch the world as it is". Bleiker assumes that there is always a distance between r...

International Studies Quarterly, 2018

Images pervade contemporary politics. Across the globe, people receive more and more of their information and impressions about politics through media outlets saturated with images, while political leaders show increasing skill in melding popular culture and political power. Understanding the aesthetic dimensions of world politics is thus of paramount importance. This article seeks to deepen our understanding of the historical and political relationship between images and international theory. Contrary to the predominant view, it argues that, far from being absent from international relations (IR), aesthetics concerns were at the heart of the intellectual politics in which the postwar study of international relations developed. The article shows that suspicion toward aesthetics in IR is not simply the result of ignorance about emotions or images in politics, nor of methodological myopia. Instead its roots are political and lie in the powerful political constellation of Cold War liberalism, social science, and the foreign policy strategies and political struggles of the Cold War. This history has largely disappeared from the self-understanding of the field, but its recovery is essential in appreciating the place of aesthetics in international relations theory and addressing the challenges posed by aesthetics in contemporary world politics.

Australian Journal of International Affairs, 2021

This essay outlines the contribution that Australia-based scholars have made to aesthetic politics: the exploration of creative and interdisciplinary approaches to International Relations. The struggle to legitimise aesthetic insights is indicative of a larger challenge: how academic disciplines discipline thought in ways that constrains innovative scholarly contributions and their potential to address concrete political problems. The essay advances an argument in favour of seeing beyond the discipline of International Relations. The international is not some higherorder realm that is separate from the rest of the social and political world. The most pressing challenges, from terrorism to climate change, are too complex to be understood as uniquely international phenomena. They implicate the local as much as the global, the psychological as much as the institutional and the relational as much as the structural. Finding practical and policyrelevant solutions to complex transnational problems requires insights from fields as diverse as psychology, neuroscience, literature, demography art and economics, to name just a few. Needed, then, is greater acceptance and support for creative approaches that can understand and address political challenges from multiple parallel perspectives and without having to adhere to preconceived disciplinary conventions.

Political Perspectives

Roland Bleiker identifies two shifts in the production of knowledge about world politics. In the first of these shifts the so-called "postmodern" scholars began to challenge positivist foundations of knowledge (Bleiker, 2001: 510). They raised questions about how the "parameters" of knowledge made it difficult, if not impossible, to locate and explore a wide range of other insights into world politics (see for instance .

Introduction: the three models for modernity Modernity can be characterized by three dominant models, each of which has controlled the technological, the economic, and the governmental system respectively: industrialism, capitalism, and nationalism. For its energy supply, the industrial model digs down into the entrails of the earth to pump out oil. Capitalism gets its energy from an oversupply of unskilled labor force keeping salaries as low as possible to barely cover basic survival and reproduction needs of the proletariat. Nation-States extract their energy from tax collection which is coagulated labour-time (in Marx's terms) within its arbitrary borders. Although the capitalist model was temporarily and partially substituted by socialist and communist regimes in some areas, it has certainly prevailed as the most resilient and lucrative economic pattern in human history. In turn, the industrial model has proven a spectacular success in controlling millions of people's lives by the manufacture, distribution, consumption and imposition of commodities, imaginaries and lifestyles. No less successful has been the nationalist model deployed in both East and West, rich and poor, theocratic and secular societies and vehemently defended by the left and right parties as an incontrovertible value. The most diverse oligarchic, fundamentalist, dictatorial, democratic, or monarchic political regimes all adjust to the nationalistic model at least at an ideological level to demand loyalty. Since the nineteenth century, nationalism proliferated epidemically across all continents silhouetting States as didactic colored puzzles in a geography class. This model has also been utilized to nullify other minority identities and invent new ones ad hoc for political and economic purposes.

Global Society, 2010

The relationship between the aesthetic and the political is historically controversial and increasingly complex. In broad terms, politics is associated with a commitment to substantial debate and concrete action, where aesthetics is related to image, style, and performance. Due to this dialectic, political aesthetics has been often equated with a potential for manipulation and mystification. The 20th century was set apart by pessimism toward popular culture and anxiety around the role and use of aesthetics in the political sphere. Though this suspicion towards the aesthetic persists across the humanities and social sciences, the growing interdependence of the popular and the political, alongside recent changes in communication technology, have compelled a number of scholars to consider aesthetics as a fundamental dimension of political activity. Careful attention to key moments of tension and complementarity, especially where political critique is realized through spectacle, encourages productive engagement with the aesthetic dimensions of political communication. Thanks to such engagement, it further becomes clear that the visual plays an especially significant role in mainstream and activist politics alike, insofar as key political activities such as debate, protest, and action commonly take place in and through sensorially rich mediated arenas like television, digital journalism, and social media.