Cinematic Ontologies and Viewer Epistemologies: Knowing International Politics as Moving Images

Abstract

Waves of “inclusion” (and defences of exclusion) in international relations (IR) over 30 years have involved conflict over the legitimacy (or not) of both materials (i.e. objects from which knowledge can be gained) and methods. This article takes a broadly phenomenological approach to IR where human “knowers” and the "known” (where “the known” is intrinsically human, even if a “material” object) are fundamental assumptions. IR as an activity can then be parsed into three “life-worlds”: that of academic “knower”; that of “state-actors”; and that of “ordinary people.” This article suggests a merger of the three life-worlds into one, that of the “movie-goer”. It then speculates on the kinds of “knowledges” this might produce in supplementing or supplanting conventional views in IR as to who “knows” and from what materials (and hence methods) they “know” international politics.

Notes

1. See the discussion on this issue of nomenclature in John Baylis, Steve Smith and Patricia Owens (eds.), The Globalization of World Politics, 4th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 2–3.

2. See David R. Cerbone, Understanding Phenomenology (Durham: Acumen, 2006). The concept “life-world” comes originally from Edmund Husserl's turn from a philosophy focusing on consciousness to one in which the human subject is always already within a world of prejudgements and meanings, through which and against which anything must be known. For a discussion of “life-world”, see David West, An Introduction to Continental Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), pp. 95–96, 107–108; see also David Woodruff Smith, Husserl (Milton Park: Routledge, 2006).

3. See the discussion of the “moral grammar” of US politics as a set of social self-understandings reflected in, and re-circulated by, the film industry, in Cynthia Weber, Imagining America at War: Morality, Politics, and Film (Milton Park: Routledge, 2006), pp. 1–9, where the argument is that such common grammars are continually re-run as grids of intelligibility through which politics is understood and performed by individuals.

4. The White House, for example, has a “Family Theatre”; see the website for a record of its origin and transformations, and for a brief account of various presidents and their viewing predilections: <http://www.whitehousemuseum.org/east-wing/theater.htm> (accessed 27 March 2010).

5. See, for example, the summarising discussions of the way in which some feminists have experienced this contesting and policing of boundaries in Cynthia Weber, “Good Girls, Little Girls and Bad Girls: Male Paranoia in Robert Keohane's Critique of Feminist International Relations”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2 (1994), pp. 337–349; and J. Ann Tickner, “You Just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements between Feminists and IR Theorists”, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 4 (1997), pp. 611–632.

6. See the student-related materials in, for example, Baylis, Smith and Owens, op. cit., passim.

7. For a self-consciously contrary and more inclusive approach, see Laura J. Shepherd (ed.), Gender Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations (Milton Park: Routledge, 2010); for an inclusive approach at introductory level that focuses on cinema in particular, see Cynthia Weber, International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edn (Milton Park: Routledge, 2004).

8. While feminist IR, for example, is often and rightly read as an inclusion into IR of women, and of issues and spaces that have tended to be associated with women, it can also be read as a project aimed at legitimating the inclusion of materials not normally or traditionally considered worthy of study, or even for use as evidence; see, for example, Cynthia Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), where a wide range of textual and visual material and artefacts is examined using “feminist curiosity”.

9. For a discussion of the relation between representation and truth in international politics that draws on aesthetic theory and art-objects, see Steve Smith, “Singing our World into Existence: International Relations Theory and September 11”, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 3 (2004), pp. 499–515; for a discussion of the “aesthetic turn” in IR, using poetics and poetry in particular, see Roland Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

10. For “inclusion” discussions relating to popular culture, particularly science fiction, see, for example, Jutta Weldes (ed.), To Seek out New Worlds: Exploring Links between Science Fiction and World Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); for use of spy fiction and video games, among other non-traditional materials, see James der Derian, Anti-diplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed and War (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), and idem, Critical Practices in International Theory: Selected Essays (Milton Park: Routledge, 2009); for travel writing, see Debbie Lisle, “Gender at a Distance: Identity, Performance and Contemporary Travel Writing”, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1999), pp. 66–88; for popular music, see M.I. Franklin (ed.), Resounding International Relations: On Music, Culture and Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

11. For a discussion linking aesthetic theory to the cinema and then to international politics, see Gerard Holden, “Cinematic IR, the Sublime and the Indistinctiveness of Art”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 34, No. 3 (2005), pp. 793–818; for further work in IR that uses cinema, see Michael J. Shapiro, Cinematic Political Thought: Narrating Race, Nation and Gender (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), and idem, Cinematic Geopolitics (Milton Park: Routledge, 2008); see also Weber, Imagining America at War.

12. See the discussion of empiricism in Ted Benton and Ian Craib, Philosophy of Social Science: The Philosophical Foundations of Social Thought (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 13–27.

13. Susan Sontag, On Photography 1977 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008) was a foundational work in the development of post-structuralist thinking about visual representation and interpretive practices.

14. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life 1959 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990) was a significant, if often unacknowledged, source for post-structuralist views on scripting and performativity in relation to action and intelligibility.

15. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd edn (Abingdon: Routledge, 1999).

16. For a discussion of the philosophical moves through which Jacques Derrida prioritised written over spoken language, see Nicholas Royle, Jacques Derrida (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003).

17. For a basic but thoughtful introduction to visual analysis, see James Monaco, How to Read a Film: Movies, Media and Beyond, 4th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

18. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992) works very much this way.

19. The trajectory of Michael J. Shapiro's work could be read in this way, beginning with his “turn” away from empirical social science to post-structuralism as a worldview, and from there into the validation of different kinds of materials, particularly cinema, as objects through which IR-practitioners can come to “know” international politics; see the transition from early articles such as G. Matthew Bonham, Michael J. Shapiro and George J. Nozicka, “The Foreign Policy Decision Maker Simulation: A Mathematical Description”, Simulation and Gaming, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1976), pp. 123–152, to Language and Political Understanding (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), and on to The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photography and Policy Analysis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); see also his “Genres, Technologies and Spaces of Being-in-Common”, in Alan Finlayson and Jeremy Valentine (eds.), Politics and Post-structuralism: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), pp. 206–222.

20. Cultural studies arose in the 1970s as the low culture/high culture boundary dissolved, and pop art and other demotic critiques of “high art” developed; see Chris Barker, Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice, 3rd edn (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2007) and similar introductory texts.

21. The perspective here derives from Foucauldian views that knowledge is produced, rather than found, that it is validated by regimes of truth generated and enforced through social institutions and the formation of cognate subjectivities and that this is always accompanied by political processes of discipline and policing; see Gary Gutting, Foucault (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). For textbook accounts of the theoretical frameworks and methodological protocols through which IR is commonly understood, and just as importantly—taught—as an activity, see Baylis, Smith and Owens, op. cit., pp. 90–206; Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki and Steve Smith (eds.), International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 52–265; Scott Burchill, Andrew Linklater, Richard Devetak, Jack Donnelly, Matthew Paterson, Christian Reus-Smith and Jacqui True, Theories of International Relations, 3rd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 29–257.

22. For a discussion of politics as real-life drama in relation to “knowing”, see Staci L. Beavers, “The West Wing as a Pedagogical Tool”, PS: Political Science and Politics, Vol. 35, No. 2 (2002), pp. 213–216; for a discussion that largely trivialises the use of filmed drama, see Archie W. Simpson and Bernd Kaussler, “IR Teaching Reloaded: Using Films and Simulations in the Teaching of International Relations”, International Studies Perspectives, Vol. 10, No. 4 (2009), pp. 413–427.

23. For an exposition of this post-structuralist view that knowledge arises within epistemological (and hence ontological) presumptions, see David Howarth, Discourse (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 2000); for an application of this argument to the vocabularies through which different human sciences constitute knowledge and validate method, see Michael J. Shapiro, “Metaphor in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences”, Cultural Critique, No. 2 (Winter 1985/86), pp. 191–214; for explications specific to IR, see Shepherd, op. cit., pp. 3–27.

24. For a study that links realism as a discourse with image-making and politics, see Michael J. Shapiro, Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

25. See the discussions of the relationship between popular culture in various forms and international politics in John Street, Mass Media, Politics and Democracy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001); see also Christina Rowley, “Popular Culture and the Politics of the Visual”, in Shepherd, op. cit., pp. 309–325; and Jutta Weldes, “Going Cultural: Star Trek, State Action and Popular Culture”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 28, No. 1 (1999), pp. 117–134.

26. See, for example, the discussion of Singapore in this respect in Souchou Yao, Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006); and Kenneth Paul Tan, Cinema and Television in Singapore: Resistance in One Dimension (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

27. For a general statement of this view, see Shapiro, The Politics of Representation; see also Terrell Carver and Matti Hyvärinen (eds.), Interpreting the Political: New Methodologies (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 1–6; and Terrell Carver and Jernej Pikalo (eds), Political Language and Metaphor: Interpreting and Changing the World (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), pp. 1–11.

28. See Bleiker, op. cit., pp. 18–47.

29. See Milja Kurki, “International Relations and Social Science”, in Dunne, Kurki and Smith, op. cit., pp. 14–25.

30. For a paradigm-shaking discussion of “the material” as an effect of “materialisation” brought about by discursive repetition, see Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 32–35, 67–69; see also Samuel A. Chambers and Terrell Carver Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), pp. 35–41; and Moya Lloyd, Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics (Cambridge: Polity), pp. 49–77.

31. See, for example, Robert W. Gregg, International Relations on Film (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998), pp. 2–3, where cinema is used throughout as a “window on the world”, thus assuming that the world is already known independently of the movie; see also Daniel H. Nexon and Iver B. Neumann (eds), Harry Potter and International Relations (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), where again the world is merely found as something already “known”, and so available for refiguration in the novel and related films.

32. See Weber, Imagining America at War, where this is the main argument.

33. See François Debrix, Tabloid Terror: War, Culture and Geopolitics (New York: Routledge, 2008), where a certain sector of the press and media is linked politically post-9/11 with a “tabloid culture” which is credited with specific knowledge effects.

34. For a definitive study, see Michael P. Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie and other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987).

35. This use of “performativity” is derived from Butler, Gender Trouble, pp. 171–190; see also Chambers and Carver, op. cit., pp. 34–50.

36. For a noteworthy exception, see Carol Cohn, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals”, Signs, Vol. 12, No. 4 (1987), pp. 687–718.