In Search of Thinking Space: Reflections on the Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory

The Aesthetic Turn Then and Now: Short Autoethnographic Reflections

I am honoured by the opportunity to respond to the contributions to this Forum and to reflect on the aesthetic turn. I am also humbled by the task. Highlighting the relevance of aesthetics to politics is often met with suspicion. The study of aesthetics is the study of taste and beauty and how they awaken in us certain affective sensibilities. The world of global politics is, by contrast, a hard-nosed world of power and might, of conflict and struggle, an all-too-real world that is far removed from the seemingly trivial realm of aesthetics. Not so, argue an increasing number of scholars. They have done so for many years now, and compellingly. They have revealed how aesthetic sensibilities can help us rethink some of the most serious problems in global politics.

The situation then and now is rather different. Around the turn of the millennium International Relations was still a rather narrow academic discipline. Most inquiries revolved around traditional state-centric themes and were considered legitimate only if conducted in a conventional social scientific manner. Prevailing approaches were trying to come to terms with having failed to anticipate the collapse of the Cold War. It was a time of disciplinary insecurity and introspection; a time of the so-called neo-neo debate, waged between structural realists and liberal institutionalists. Alternative approaches, including those that investigated or relied upon aesthetic sources, were ignored at best, resisted and ridiculed at worst. The key task for critically minded scholars consisted of legitimising broader engagements with the political. The Millennium special issue was an important step in this direction. Today such legitimisations are no longer needed. Aesthetic approaches might not yet have entered the mainstream of International Relations scholarship but they are numerous and influential enough to have made a significant difference. As Anca Pusca stresses in this Forum: An entire new generation of interdisciplinary academics has arisen, pushing the boundaries of how we can understand global politics.

The task today, then, is no longer to legitimise aesthetic approaches but to reflect on their contribution and to contemplate opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. Or so at least is the task I set myself in this short commentary. I do not have the space here to mention – yet alone assess systematically – the numerous insightful contributions on aesthetic politics that have emerged over the past decade. I offer my apology and my gratitude to the respective scholars. My aim is inevitably more limited: to selectively draw upon the Forum contributions to identify both the political opportunities that the aesthetic turn has opened up and the challenges involved in pursuing them.

Opening Up Thinking Space

The first point to make is that this is not about agenda-setting. Not then. Not now. Twenty years ago, when I started working on my ‘Aesthetic Turn’ essay, and on a previous one called ‘Forget IR Theory’, I was moving from a PhD to an extended period of unemployment. The very last thing in mind was shaping anybody’s agenda. My purpose was both more modest and more personal. I wanted to survive in an academic world that seemingly had no place for me. I wanted to break through disciplinary walls and carve out at least a little thinking space that made it possible for me to follow my scholarly passions. I wanted to write differently and about different things: not in social science lingo and not about states and statesmen, but about transnational dissent, about oppression, gender and culture, and about how all this shaped international politics. Aesthetics offered a vocabulary and a conceptual framework to do so: it was full of excitement and promise.

A lot has changed since then but one issue remains: this is not about agenda setting. It should not be up to me – or anyone else – to determine what can and cannot be investigated as a political theme, and what is and is not proper International Relations research.

In short, the main point I want to make in this commentary is that the aesthetic turn was and should continue to be about opening up thinking space. This process is never complete. Everything and everyone should be up for scrutiny, not in a personalised way, for scholars should be driven by generosity, but to highlight practices of exclusion that are inevitably part of all scholarly moves. This is not to say that aesthetic approaches are automatically insightful or progressive. One can all too easily romanticise the aesthetic and forget that it can be – and often is – intertwined with practices of domination. Well-known examples here are Leni Riefenstahl’s aesthetically compelling films, made in the service of Nazi Germany’s propaganda machine.

The realm of the aesthetic is neither good nor bad, neither progressive nor regressive. But an appreciation of aesthetics offers us possibilities to re-think, re-view, re-hear and re-feel the political world we live in. Aesthetics provides us with insights that we otherwise would not be able to gain.

Opening up thinking space inevitably involves risks. It is to embrace creativity, and the uncertainty associated with it, over the comfort of time-honoured procedures and disciplinary conventions. It is to never stand still and to search for ever new ways of writing, sensing, seeing and hearing the political. Taking such risks is well worthwhile but should also be associated with modesty and self-reflexivity. We need to be transparent about the political choices we make in the design, implementation and presentation of our research. An aesthetic approach to the political has to avoid the hubris associated with the idea that we can advance the kind of grand theories that offer objective and overarching explanations of the world. There are alternatives. Pluralist alternatives. In this Forum Aida Hozić highlights the ‘ambivalent effects of the aesthetic turn’ and Shine Choi promotes a ‘cultivation of vulnerability’ as a location of insight. I now try to show how such an embrace of pluralism, ambivalence and vulnerability – and perhaps even of doubt – can help us understand how and why aesthetic approaches can offer key insight into the dynamics that shape global politics.

What Is Aesthetic Politics? Why Is It Important?

Pluralism is important when approaching the first and one of the most fundamental questions: What is aesthetic politics and why is it important? Multiple approaches and perspectives compete with each other here, sometimes quarrelling about the definition of aesthetics with an intensity that reflects what Freud in a different context called the narcissism of small differences. In doing so they miss what matters most: Pluralism is not a threat, but an opportunity. This point is particularly important in a rapidly changing digital age, as Laura Shepherd points out in this Forum, for the ever increasing speed and capability of communication blurs the lines not only between mainstream and social media or between high and low culture, but also between consumers and producers of knowledge.

When trying to define aesthetic politics back then, I was inspired by F.R. Ankersmit and made a differentiation between mimetic and aesthetic approaches: The former seek to depict politics as realistically and authentically as possible, whereas the latter acknowledge that there is always a gap between a representation and what it represents. ² This gap is not only inevitable but also of key political importance for it has to do with collective conventions that determine which one of numerous plausible explanations are considered legitimate and which ones are deemed unreasonable or illegitimate.

Art is often the first thing that comes to mind with regards to the aesthetic. It is thus not surprising that several commentaries in this Forum explore the links between art and politics. The contribution of artists emerges not from authentically depicting the world, but from engaging the process of representation. This is precisely why some of the most significant insights into global politics emerge not from endeavours that ignore representation, but from those that explore how representative practices themselves have come to shape political events. Consider a couple of examples. Picasso’s painting Guernica became such a powerful symbol of the horrors of war because it brought out a kind of emotional truth about suffering that went beyond the mere representation of external appearances. The novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky have told the world far more about social and political life in nineteenth century Russia than history books because they capture not just facts and figures but also the values and spirit of an epoch – its Zeitgeist, as the Germans would say. Or consider how Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said urge us to make music more central to education and socio-cultural life because it allows us to experience the world anew and to challenges political conventions that are so entrenched that they are uncritically accepted as common sense. ³

Aesthetic politics, in this sense, is about the ability to step back, reflect and see, hear and sense political conflict and dilemmas in new ways. Aesthetics thus refers not only to practices of art – from painting to music, poetry, photography and film – but also, and above all, to the type of insights and understandings they facilitate.

Equally important is to recognise that politics itself always has an aesthetic. Brent Steele highlights in this Forum, and in previous publications, how the nature and action of states has an aesthetic. Staging a military parade or celebrating a national holiday are examples of aesthetic practices designed to make a state appear differently than it otherwise would; more united, for instance, or more ethical, or more powerful. Likewise, Claes Belfrage and Earl Gammon, as well as Jill Gibbon and Christine Sylvester, point out how aesthetics masks ‘dominant modes of economic interactions’ and ‘normalise war’. There is no escape from aesthetics, so to speak. Not in politics, not in scholarship about it. Even mimetic approaches that rely on positivist understanding have an aesthetic, as Steele points out: one that assumes there is a ‘real’ out there that can be represented in an authentic and neutral way.

Aesthetic politics, then, has both an ontological and epistemological dimension: It is about the nature of politics and its actors and about our knowledge of them. Who does what and what counts for knowledge and why?

Jacques Rancière’s theory of political aesthetics helps us understand the political implications of this recognition. He explores how we negotiate the sensible world, and how an epoch’s ‘distribution of the sensible’ determines what is arbitrarily but self-evidently accepted as thinkable, reasonable and doable. The content and contours of politics are inevitably linked to how we – as political and cultural collectives – speak, hear, visualise and feel about ourselves and others. Because these aesthetic practices frame what is thinkable and doable they are political at their very core. ⁴

Existing distributions of the sensible might be practices of exclusion but they are never fixed. Indeed, Rancière stresses that aesthetic engagements with the political offer particularly powerful ways to reconfigure our sensory experience of the world. This is to say that aesthetic engagements can become political and politically disruptive in the most fundamental way: by challenging the boundaries of what is visible and invisible, thinkable and unthinkable and thus of what can and cannot be debated in politics. The issues at stake here are, ultimately, about what is at the core of International Relations, the question of power: Who has the power to speak about what and whom and in which ways?

Navigating between Creativity and Communication

Opening up thinking space involves both opportunities and challenges. The task is clear: to find new ways of thinking, seeing, hearing and sensing the political; to break free of disciplinary boundaries; to write creatively and to explore other ways of communicating. Several commentators in this Forum highlight this point. Pusca writes of how aesthetic approaches go beyond convening political messages and change how we see and perceive the world. For Choi, this is a disorienting process that challenges what is acceptable and tolerable and, in doing so, brings about new modes of thinking and knowing.

Language is an obvious starting point. Existing modes of knowing are inevitably linked to existing ways of speaking and writing. To think differently is to stretch the boundaries of language. The commentaries by Choi and by Gibbon and Sylvester are good illustrations of such aesthetic engagements: They are explicitly written in a manner that diverges from linguistic conventions in the social sciences, and they push our minds along a different route than the one we would usually take. Numerous International Relations scholars have meanwhile started to embrace experimental writing styles. Examples here include autoethnographic and narrative approaches to global politics.

The pursuit of creative experimental research also comes with responsibilities. These responsibilities are particularly pronounced now as the aesthetic turn has moved from the margins to a more central position. We need to avoid academic jargon and demonstrate, in intelligible but sophisticated ways, how aesthetics can tackle big issues in global politics and change the way we think about them. The onus is on ‘us’ to demonstrate how aesthetic approaches can reveal what ordinarily lays concealed and show why these issues are of vital importance. We have to break out of specialised academic journals or sub-disciplinary debates. Preaching to the converted will not change things. Doing so is not to return to the fold of disciplinary debates or reduce everything to policy relevance. It is to recognise what poets have always known: that we need to stretch the boundaries of language so that we can think anew, but do so in ways that still allow us to communicate and change the way we think about the world.

The politics of aesthetic communication inevitably has to go beyond pushing the boundaries of language. Other aesthetic engagements are becoming increasingly important. Numerous International Relations scholars have meanwhile started to tackle political issues through alternative modes of knowing and communicating, such as art, photo essays, novels, music or documentary films. Just as important is, as Steele argues in this Forum, to extend the aesthetic turn into the realm of pedagogy. Different ways of knowing are inevitably linked to different ways of communicating in the context of classroom teaching, where most of us academics will have far more of an impact through our scholarly publications. Pedagogy here is, as Steele says, a form of ‘aesthetic action’ that validates different voices and visions in an effort to foster a critical understanding of politics.

The Ethics of Aesthetic Politics: From Hubris to Pluralism and Reflexivity

There is an ethical dimension to the aesthetic process of pushing political boundaries, of refusing to take the world – and conventional scholarship – as granted and fixed. It is not about ethics as norms and principles. It is about being aware of the politics of exclusion, for any political regime or knowledge practice always excludes. This is why the hubris of searching for overarching scholarly explanations of the world is problematic: It becomes blind to its own partiality and fails to recognise what Shepherd stresses in this Forum: that research is always ‘a social encounter’.

Accepting pluralism is to recognise that there is no one correct interpretation of politics. It is also to acknowledge that one’s own theories and explanations, no matter how compelling they may seem, inevitably exclude. This is no different with aesthetic approaches to the political. They conceal as much as they reveal. They have, during the past two decades, opened up a range of insights and possibilities. But they have also excluded. The most obvious realm here is, as pointed out by several contributors to this Forum, the Eurocentric nature of aesthetic theories: They are mostly Western constructs. This is why Steele urges us to move beyond a ‘Western lens’ and Pusca wants us to open up our gaze towards the life of others. Aesthetic approaches to global politics will have to address this challenge and many others that we cannot even see yet.

We should keep an open mind – and an open heart – towards the people and perspectives we exclude. This is the very nature and mission of aesthetic politics: to always search for thinking space, to be open-minded and self-reflective, to find new verbal, visual, audial and sensual ways of understanding the political dilemmas we face. May this process never be complete and may we have the self-awareness, modesty and confidence to acknowledge and challenge our limitations.