Deadly Matters: Disciplinary Dilemmas in Aesthetic IR

Abstract International Relations (IR) has long been imagined as the discipline of somber, serious, “deadly” matters. This imagination constitutes a regime of visibility, intelligibility, and exigency—or, in the terms of Jacques Rancière, a disciplinary distribution of the sensible—that has profoundly shaped the manner in which popular culture has been constructed as an object of inquiry for aesthetic IR. The primary consequence of this distribution of the sensible is the tendency to reduce popular culture to its harmful effects. The benefit of this strategy is to establish aesthetic IR as a distinctive approach to world politics, in terms of its substantive focus on popular culture artifacts, as well as to popular culture, in terms of revealing the normative and ideological work popular culture does at the intersection of the everyday-local with the global-systemic. However, this successful incorporation of aesthetic IR into IR has reproduced the onto-epistemic distinctions that have consecrated IR as the discipline of “deadly matters,” chiefly that between the knowing IR scholar and the “knowledge-poor” that are the objects of her analysis. This creates an epistemic, methodological, and deontological dilemma, in that the necessary focus on “deadly matters” renders invisible the many subjects of popular culture, which contradicts the stated mission of aesthetic IR to make visible the multiplicity of knowledges and subjectivities constitutive of international politics.