Pop Goes IR? Researching the Popular Culture—World Politics Continuum

Introduction

Popular culture and world politics are often conceptualised within the discipline of international relations (IR) as potentially interconnected but ultimately separate domains. In part, this has been a reflection of the preference for IR to focus on the mechanisms, institutional arrangements, interests, bureaucracies and decision-making processes that constitute relations among states, business and civil society actors. From this perspective, popular culture would be important in so far as it could be shown to have caused some kind of effect within these formal sites of activity. Effects are most often defined as a policy outcome, like the impact of Live8 on poverty reduction programmes agreed to by the G-8. While such a focus may help to determine why specific outcomes have occurred, it is unable to provide insight into how these outcomes and the understandings of politics that underpin them become possible. An analysis of ‘how did it become possible?’, an endeavour that spans across a range of theoretical orientations labelled ‘critical’ in IR, necessitates an engagement with ‘the arena[s] where the setting up of particular systems of power and their maintenance on a day to day basis is contested’ (Edkins, 2002, p. 256; see also Ashley and Walker, 1990; George and Campbell, 1990; Walker, 1993).

Numerous cultural and post-colonial theorists – such as Adorno and Horkheimer (1997 [1944]), Althusser (2001), Appadurai (1996), Barthes (1993 [1957]), Dorfman and Mattelart (1975), Eagleton (2005), Hall (1980), Harvey (1989), Laclau (1979), Lyotard (1984), Said (1981) and Williams (1985) – have been able to demonstrate that relations of power and their contestation extend beyond parliaments, summits or street protests. All of these thinkers have positioned popular culture as indivisible from politics. Each of them – for different purposes and in different ways – has identified popular culture as an important site where power, ideology and identity are constituted, produced and/or materialised. There are a range of signifying and lived practices such as poetry, film, sculpture, music, television, leisure activities and fashion that constitute popular culture. The point is that all of these elements contribute to a terrain of ‘exchange’, ‘negotiation’, ‘resistance’ and ‘incorporation’ where the construction of the political and the type of politics it engenders are formed (Storey, 2006, pp. 1–12). Moreover, there has been the recognition that this terrain is expanding both vertically – along the local/global axis – and horizontally in terms of the volume of practices, genres within them and the speed with which they circulate.

From the rise of ‘celebrity politicians’ to new political economies generated by online video games like World of Warcraft, something significant is occurring with respect to popular culture, world politics and the perceived bandwidth of political possibility (Barboza, 2005; Corner and Pels, 2003; Jones, 2004; Marshall, 1997; Street, 2004; Turner, 2004; West and Orman, 2003; Van Zoonen, 2004). The vexing question is: precisely what might that be? The exact mechanisms at play and those processes, forces and structures – political, social or political economic – that might underwrite world politics in popular culture and popular culture in world politics remain open (Davies, 2005). Any answers presuppose an additional set of questions: what conceptual tools are already available and what tools might need to be developed, refined or even redeployed? Arguably, the methodological tools provided by critical approaches to the study of international politics are better able to open up fruitful avenues of inquiry as the ‘cause and effect’ demands of positivism must maintain a categorical separation between politics and (popular) culture, leading to important dynamics being missed. For example, violent films or video games may not cause young men to go out and kill but they may provide one layer in the complex continuum that congeals into deeply seated antagonisms towards particular others.

In this article, we start the process of thinking about how we might find answers to these questions above. We offer a potential research agenda for the study of popular culture in IR and outline how such a research agenda could be advanced. Our starting point is that attention must be devoted to developing theoretical and analytical means for accounting for the manifest influences of world politics as popular culture and popular culture as world politics while providing some guidance on how these tools could be taken up by forms of critical IR theory that concern themselves with arenas of political contestation. Such groundwork is going to be essential to the development of systematic questions about popular culture, the locations of world politics, methodologically sound approaches for analysing their continuum and, ultimately, a deeper understanding of IR.

The popular culture-world politics continuum

We believe that if the incorporation of popular culture into IR is going to be fruitful, there must be a willingness to go beyond an engagement with illustrations of world politics. There is a need to investigate the political possibilities and limits of the politics produced and/or shaped by popular culture. This requires extending beyond identifying allegories and metaphors that take world politics and popular culture as static structural givens (Ruane and James, 2008). Doing so will allow us to appreciate better what is at stake in the mutual implication of world politics and popular culture.

Moreover, popular culture should not merely be reduced to a superstructure that reflects a political base. We argue that the ongoing and phenomenal growth in the production and circulation of popular culture makes world politics what it currently is. If we understand the investigation of world politics as the ‘philosophical anthropology of everyday life on a global scale’, visual and representational imaginaries are sites where politics and political subjectivity are constituted and where the politics of affect, emotion, feeling and reaction challenge cosy assumptions about rationality, rational political actors and the decisions said to flow from them (Campbell, 1996, p. 24; see also Hutchison and Bleiker, 2008).

It is also in the cultural imaginary that significant political battles are fought, ‘because it is here that coherent narratives are produced, which in turn serve as the basis for any sense of community and political action’ that define politics (Bronfen, 2006, pp. 21–23; see also Bleiker and Hutchison, 2008, p. 131; Dodds, 2008, p. 227). In turn, political subjectivities, the politics of affect and their constitutive narratives found in popular culture are not irrelevant to material processes such as production, environmental degradation, war-fighting or the pursuit of profit margins. Nor are these material relations necessarily irrelevant to the range of ways in which popular culture becomes manifest and understood as political.

The constitutive, productive and material relations that bind world politics and popular culture have long been evident in popular culture itself: the spy genre in fiction, for example, has traditionally used the backdrop of international conflicts to explore the human condition. More recently, the influences of popular culture on questions of political necessity have been outwardly acknowledged by practitioners. For example, Philippe Sands (2008) has noted the impact that Jack Bauer (the character from Fox Television's dramatic series 24) had on the counter-terrorism discussions of high-ranking American policymakers. Similarly, The West Wing became a favoured venue for members of the US Congress to test proposed policy initiatives. The programme provided, in their view, an opportunity for an airing and ‘intelligent mulling’ of policy ideas unavailable in more traditional formats (Burke-man, cited in Philpott and Mutimer, 2005).

More generally, there is a well-documented history of collaboration between the Pentagon and Hollywood stretching back to at least the Second World War. Indeed, throughout the twentieth century, newspapers, visual media including, for example, First and Second World War posters, and electronic media such as radio – as in Rwanda in 1994 – and television have, with varying degrees of sophistication, been venues in which cultural depictions of self and other have been formulated for explicitly political purposes. Today, we are inundated with new sites of popular cultural formation from texting to the blogosphere and YouTube. It has become clear from their extensive use in documenting actions undertaken by US troops in Iraq, by the Israeli Defence Force in Gaza and by those who resist invasion by splicing locally filmed images with those of Hollywood blockbusters and news reports of atrocities, that political battles are waged over the distribution, access and content of these media. ¹ While the messages conveyed are themselves important, arguably the technologies also produce new types of association, identity and mobilisation shaped by popular sentiments and understandings of political possibility (Baudrillard, 1994; McLuhan, 2001; Poster, 1995, 1997, 2000 and 2001; Shaheen, 2008; Virilio, 1989).

Thus, there is a complexity at play that makes a strong case for viewing popular culture and world politics as a continuum. Each is implicated in the practices and understandings of the other. The extent to which these implications become manifest and the depth with which they do so will depend on the interplay of a host of contextual factors and how these are understood: for example, the issue, the medium, the political environment and the audience. Yet, even at the extreme polar ends, popular culture cannot be divorced from world politics nor world politics from popular culture.

The popular culture-world politics continuum is not a product of mapping where intersections between the two take place, the lines of connection between them or the moments when they break apart. Rather, conceptualising them as a continuum brings sensitivity to how political phenomena are, at times, diminutively positioned as properly residing within the sphere of popular culture and, at others, positioned as important products of world politics despite being intertextual, mutually constitutive and even materially entangled through cycles of production, distribution and consumption. Such a conceptualisation also prompts us to remember that these designations themselves and the ways in which they are generated embody an important type of politics that requires analysis.

A popular culture-world politics research agenda

If we take popular culture and world politics as a continuum, where does it draw us conceptually and empirically in trying to make sense of contemporary IR? First, it provides an impetus to view the signifying and lived practices of popular culture as ‘texts’ that can be understood as political and as sites where politics takes place (Allison, 2006; Der Derian, 2001; Franklin, 2005; Gregg, 1998; Marez, 2004; Nexon and Neumann, 2006; Shapiro, 1997, 1999, 2004 and 2008; Taylor, 2003; Weber, 2006a and 2006b; Weldes, 2003; Westwell, 2006). Second, drawing upon work in cultural studies on popular culture will open up new avenues of investigation in IR. For example, what are the relations between ‘the popular’ of popular culture as a force producing the identity of a people and the nation state as an actor in IR? As the Joe Canadian advert for Molson Canadian Beer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRI-A3vakVg) demonstrated in 2000, premeditated branding, performative discursive practices and new circuits of distribution can mobilise popular support for elite identity narratives underpinning state foreign policy by shifting the location of their apparent emergence to the people (Grayson, 2008). Third, being sensitive to the influences of popular culture will change how we understand IR as a scholarly discipline by transforming our perceptions of the sights, sites and cites of power and the ways in which hegemony and resistance are operationalised (O'Tuathail, 1996, p. 71).

Fourth, there are research, teaching and outreach opportunities that could arise from greater incorporation of the analysis of popular culture by IR. Practically, the field ought to be concerned with how perceptions of political possibility in global affairs are substantiated. Beyond formal policy statements, press interviews and traditional forms of propaganda, popular culture draws attention to how understandings of world politics and the legitimation of policy postures can be generated by feelings of abjection or through the production of the sublime (Debrix, 2008). While the focus has often been on the Anglo-American world, taking popular culture seriously in IR requires us to look more closely at the specific signifying and lived practices that constitute popular culture across the globe – whether it is the funk carioca music of Rio's favelas or Nigeria's status as the ‘Nollywood’ of African film production – to see how these both reflect and constitute understandings of political possibility in world politics.

Fifth, there are also issues around interpretation. How do particular audiences actually interpret what could be considered politicised content in songs like ‘Born in the USA’, television programmes such as The Wire, movies like Slumdog Millionaire or the street art of Paul Insect and Banksy (Dodds, 2006; Dittmer and Dodds, 2008)? In what ways is politics itself framed and ‘sold’ to particular national, ethnic, religious and gendered audiences? What media work best for the framing of politics in different polities? Results may prove to be counter-intuitive. For example, Heather LaMarre, Kristen Landreville and Michael Beam (2009) have demonstrated that political ideology has a significant impact on how viewers perceive the satirical content of the Colbert Report, a mock current affairs television show aired in the US, Canada and the UK where the running gag is the right-wing views of the host. Conservatives in their sample were more likely to believe that Colbert really means what he says and only pretends to be joking. This simple analogy highlights other potentially significant areas of inquiry including the ways that certain genres of film speak to and foster the political expectations of particular audiences, and not just national audiences (Dodds, 2008). After all, the cinematic happy ending so beloved of Hollywood is actually American public culture made real on screen (Crothers, 2007, p. 72). It is not a political expectation shared by certain European national audiences and may in part explain deeply different interpretations of global political issues and the ways they are visually and discursively framed. Audiences have repeatedly proven themselves capable of highly sophisticated readings of films, songs and politics and are therefore difficult to capture in ways intended by producers of cultural and political products.

Sixth, cultural studies itself stands to benefit from the incorporation of concepts and approaches found within the field of IR. These will prove useful in beginning to unravel how our understandings of popular culture may shift in light of international political change – through globalisation, securitisation or environmental transformation. IR also helps to locate important sites of change in basic material reality – food cultures, for example – and the semiotic structures of political information, as well as the positioning of states, borders, people and political identities.

Seventh, there is also a considerable practical aspect to this research agenda. An awareness of the popular culture-world politics continuum should change how we teach IR and the content that we use to do so. For example, in the Politics Department at Newcastle University, there is already a long-standing undergraduate module that examines Film and Politics with a new MA degree in Popular Culture and World Politics set to launch in 2010. From photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib to the spectacle of North Korean military parades, world politics is also played out in the visual dimension. We believe that as lecturers it is important to provide students with skills that help them to see – as well as read – politics, so that they can appreciate that the visual is text and will possess the tools for considered analysis of it.

Eighth, it demands that we reconsider how we as academics engage with the general public and the policy community. Traditional means of research dissemination in print through academic publishing venues with financial access barriers look increasingly antiquated. Creative Commons licensing (www.creativecommons.org), low-cost technologies like Flip video cameras and online networks provide more rapid and potentially more interactive forms of engagement using media to which many members of the public are already predisposed.

Finally, this research agenda will require us to expand our understanding of policy and the policy community to include cultural products and producers. This raises an interesting set of questions at the point where theory meets practice. For example, do cultural workers and producers such as video game designers, film directors, musicians and street artists identify themselves as contributors to global political dynamics? If so, how do they define their roles? Furthermore, what kinds of interaction are there between cultural producers and the usual sites of international politics? If cultural producers reflect on the political contributions that might be made by popular culture in the contemporary international system, how are tensions negotiated among desires to affect, entertain and/or uphold ethico-political principles? Finally, in light of recent developments such as America's Army, the official US Army game (http://www.americasarmy.com), there is an imperative to look at how traditional political actors seek out conduits in more recent forms of popular culture and for what specific purposes they do so (Boggs and Pollard, 2008, p. 571; see also Halter, 2006; Hoglund, 2008; Power, 2007; Reichmuth and Werning, 2006; Roumani, 2006; Sisler, 2008; Vargas, 2006).

The above questions serve as the inspiration for further critical scrutiny and analysis of the ‘popular’ cultural dimensions of world politics. IR scholarship should be concerned about what happens to culture and to politics when one is rendered in terms of the other. Thus, there is a clear need to explore what is placed in the ‘frame’ of analysis when current reconfigurations of world politics are examined through the lenses of popular culture.

Conclusion

This research agenda is positioned to lend empirical and conceptual insights to the disciplines of cultural studies and IR. It is increasingly clear that it is popular culture that is held in common between the most humble acts of creativity at a mass protest and the inner sanctum of the Oval Office where presidents and their staffers watch and discuss 24 or the Battle of Algiers. The examples provided above not only suggest the efficacy of popular culture in fostering political change but are indicative of how popular culture may just become the central future location of politics, a series of meeting places where new political possibilities emerge, and where the contest over questions such as ‘what is politics?’ or ‘what is culture?’ will be contested most fiercely.

However, given that the term popular culture is in some ways inadequate to capture the diversity and sheer volume of possibilities that it might reasonably contain, it is ever more important to think rigorously and specifically about particular cultural forms. Additionally, research ought to problematise popular culture, world politics and the way in which culture may shape international power dynamics – while also looking with suspicion at the ‘popular’ dimension of popular culture as an important location for political genesis.