Schlag herself has made important contributions here, particularly by outlining the implications of visuality in the realm of international security Schlag and Heck, , pp. But she is right in stressing that so far we are still missing a systematic and fully fledged disciplinary genealogy of visual international relations.
First, visual global politics is far too complex to be understood though the lens of one disciplinary tradition alone. Studying the polities of visuality involves understanding not only the role of images—still and moving ones—but also how visual artefacts and performances take on political significance.
The spectrum of visual phenomena here ranges from photography, film, video and television to art, videogames, satellites images and computer vision, to name just a few random examples. Given the complexity of visual global politics, scholars have explored the ensuing issues from a great variety of different disciplinary perspectives.
There are inquiries into visual global politics from disciplines as diverse as media studies, communication, cultural studies, art history, philosophy and geography. Given that each of these disciplines operates according to its own disciplinary conventions and rules, one would need to conduct separate genealogies of disciplinary visual global politics for each of these disciplines.
Second, scholarly disciplines always discipline thought. This is their purpose: to arrange knowledge of the world so that it can be shared and debated and make sense to a scholarly community. Academic disciplines are powerful mechanisms that direct and control the production and diffusion of knowledge. They establish the rules of intellectual exchange and define the methods, techniques, and instruments that are considered proper for the pursuit of knowledge.
Disciplinary debates thus say as much about the politics of disciplines than they do about the topics that are being studied. Disciplines are inevitably partial. They constrain thought as much as they enable it. And they can never assess all aspects of the complex interplay between the visual and global politics. Even if one brings into conversation disciplinary debates from several disciplines, one can never escape the politics involved in producing knowledge.
A critical genealogical inquiry might be able to draw attention to the constraining aspects of such intellectual traditions but the very effort of highlighting disciplinary politics inevitably remains constraint by the parameters set up through the initial framing of debates. The key task then consists of theorizing the political role of visuality independently of the agendas, issues and terminologies that have been present by existing disciplinary debates Bleiker , pp. By side-stepping disciplinary approaches, I embraced principles of pluralism and interdisciplinarity when designing and implementing Visual Global Politics.
I invited and worked with scholars form numerous different disciplines, not just politics and international relations, but also art theory, geography, communications, media studies, journalism, sociology, anthropology and religion as well as development, gender, cultural and peace studies.
In doing so I took inspiration from one of our key contributors, Alex Danchev. He tragically died during the final stages of our book, which is dedicated to him. Danchev wrote on an exceptionally wide range of themes, from military history and terrorism to foreign policy and art history.
In addition to his work on international relations, he wrote several well-acclaimed artist biographies. He was a traditional scholar but had no time for narrow intellectual traditions. He completely disregarded—and in doing so dismantled—disciplinary boundaries. Accepting pluralism is to recognize that there is no one correct interpretation of visual global politics. They reveal and conceal and there is no way out of this process.
This is why I commissioned a large number of short chapters. Rather than offer a comprehensive survey of a topic, the idea of short chapters is to provoke and to illuminate, to offer a range of views that depict the world of visual politics from different angles. I opted for a constellation of overlapping political themes—from war and violence to peace, gender and colonialism—because a structure along visual themes seemed too constraining and too disciplinary.
I came to that view after having initially conceptualized the book by making distinctions between, say, old and new media, moving and still images, high art and popular culture. These divisions seem to align more with disciplinary investigations but the longer I worked on the book, the more they seem arbitrary and problematic. Where exactly is the difference between high art and popular culture? When do photographs move from a documentary practice to journalism to art?
Where do satellite or drone images fit in and how do we understand memes and or military parades or the politics of fashion? In the end, a structure that revolves around a wide range of political phenomena and themes allowed us to criss-cross rhizomatic visual categories, exploring them from a range of angels without necessary staking claim to some kind of authentic take on the nature and function of visual global politics.
We endorse her call for a methodological engagement with the politics of visuals. Critical scholars have increasingly embraced this call for methods and stressed the need for transparency and self-reflection see Aradau and Huysmans ; Strausz et al.
Because the Visual Global Politics is aimed at a broad readership, we did not explicitly engage the question of method. But conscious methodological considerations underlie the very structure and content of the book.
They are linked to the form of pluralism that I flagged in the previous section and to methodological approaches to visual politic that I spelled out in detail elsewhere Bleiker , , forthcoming. Here, I outlined how the concept of assemblage thinking provides a particularly useful way of anchoring a pluralist approach to the study of visual politics.
It does so by breaking with epistemological systems that require each methodological component to behave according to the same coherent overall logic see deLanda, , pp.
Once the logic of totality is forgone, it becomes possible to combine seemingly incompatible methods, from ethnographies, semiologies, genealogies and experimental surveys to content and discourse analysis. This form of methodological pluralism lies at the heart of how Visual Global Politics makes space for numerous different and differently conceptualized contributions. Schlag makes a particularly convincing point when drawing attention to the crucial role that question of causality play in the study of visuality and politics.
This is indeed the case, not least because much of the social science driven disciplinary study of international relations rely on methods that assess impact through causal models. But there are only rare instances where causality can be attributed to images. In most cases, the impact of images is more diffuse. There are, for instance, clear links between the dramatic images of the terrorist attacks on 11 September , the highly emotional rhetoric of good versus evil that emerged in response, and the ensuing war on terror.
But these links would be very difficult—if not impossible—to assess with cause-effect models. Images clearly matter in global politics but how exactly do we know? Prevailing social scientific models of cause and effect are of limited use.
They frame what can be seen, thought and said. Each of these inquiries pursues the politics of images through their own logic. We see this tension neither in dualistic nor in exclusive terms. As one of our contributors, Robert Hariman, puts it in response to Schlag:.
This back and forth movement should be seen not as a personal failing but rather as symptomatic of the basic problem: the desire for method is comprehensive while its availability is not. The term can be used, but the reality is much different. Schlag is right to call for the attempt nonetheless, but I think more attention needs to be paid, not to the loss of or need for protocols, but rather to the opportunities for expanding qualitative thinking in the social sciences.
For Hariman, such an embrace of methodical pluralism goes beyond recognizing the need to move between different modes of analysis. It cuts to the very core of how we can and should pursue the study of visual global politics:. IR analysts could use the visual artefacts as occasions for coming to recognize and understand the social and cultural constituents of political realities, and they could redefine analysis away from generalizable explanation and more toward engaged encounters, thick description, and critique from which larger patterns of explanation can be developed, not by systematic extension of an abstraction, but through comparative study of analogous cases, recurrent situations, and the like.
More simply, perhaps visual analysis could nudge IR into more explicit understanding of itself as a hermeneutical science. These are old debates, of course, but attempting to integrate visual study into IR may help to bring them more to the surface. Drawing on his past and most recent collaborative work with John Lucaites Hariman and Lucaites , , Hariman adds one more point in response to Schlag:.
That re-orientation has implications for the understanding of the image as an artefact. Again, the focus is less on how it works as one factor among many in a causal model, and more on how the image operates as a window or mirror or analogy or some other means for seeing, reflecting on, and reconsidering a situation. The image still can have causal efficacy, of course, but as it is an artefact it also is evidence of a lifeworld, and it can provide artistic resources for engaging with that world.
When taking the latter approach, it becomes neither more nor less powerful, but rather it shifts from being a driver or a supplement to a means for understanding. In response, I have outlined the contours of the pluralist approach that underlies and drives our effort to understand the links between visuality and the political. I stressed that images and visual artefacts are far too complex to be assessed and understood through one theory or one disciplinary body of knowledge alone.
This is all the more the case in a rapidly changing digital age, as Laura Shepherd , pp. This is why Visual Global Politics eschews disciplinary debates and unites scholars from a range of different backgrounds. This form of cross-disciplinary collaboration relies on a methodological framework that seeks to facilitate understanding of how images and visual artefacts work across a range of different reams.
These complex interactions cannot be understood through a single method or even a methodological framework that revolves around an internally coherent and closed logic. Different methods need to be given the chance to work based on their own logic, even if they are not compatible with an overall set of rules. The very structure of Visual Global Politics —a large number of short and relatively self-contained chapters—encapsulates this pluralist spirit.
We very much appreciate this suggestion and seek to take it even further. Several contributors to our volume suggest how this might be done. William A. Robert Hariman, likewise, wants us to go further:. We need to explore how image analysis can go beyond identifying how images are used illustratively, strategically, or ideologically to develop image interpretation as a way of thinking into political problems, scenarios, and conditions , and then drawing on aesthetic resources to better understand what is present and absent, actual and possible, emancipatory and dangerous, obligatory and degrading.
Furthermore, as Blackwood , p. Visuals are important as conveyers of information and shapers of attitudes". By paying attention to the visual components of political communication, which has been experiencing a visual turn for a while now cf. The current project proposes to go in that direction with explicit attention to the challenges outlined above.
If accepted at the proposal stage, this project presentation will elaborate on the updated norms in visual political communication outlined above and will use a number of examples from recent political campaigns in Europe and USA to illustrate the benefits of a visual-multimodal approach which breaks away from the monodisciplinarity of established communication research modes.
In doing so, it will combine theory-building with practical examples and take the field of visual communication in a new direction, informed by older and related research disciplines and by real-world phenomena. Document type : Conference papers. Complete list of metadata Display. Identifiers HAL Id : hal, version 1. Citation Seizov Ognyan.
Visual communication in the new century : challenges and norms revisited. Communiquer dans un monde de normes. L'information et la communication dans les enjeux contemporains de la " mondialisation ". Metrics Record views. But there are also images which defy planning, such as Johnson struggling with a large bull, which can be used by critics as an easy metaphor, mocking his ability to control events. Images tap into attitudes, but not always in the same way for every viewer.
This is the idea that it is true if we agree, fake if we disagree. And it is here that the power of images intersects with the great challenge of the digital age. Fake news , for example, is awarded far greater power if delivered with an image that appears believable and reinforces existing media tropes and public beliefs. But the ease with which images can be adjusted and skewed for a specific political purpose, like slowing down a video to make a politician appear drunk , makes the persuasive power of visual evidence highly dangerous.
Our research into the power of images and visual political communication suggests it can be positive or negative for a pluralist democracy. The dependent factor is how it is used.
In the context of election campaigns, for example, the digital age enables a more negative environment. It is easy to create a simple attack message and gain traction, as voters create their own election campaign communication and associated memes. Read more: I create manipulated images and videos — but quality may not matter much. Yet platforms such as Instagram can also be used to humanise a candidate. Following the example of Barack Obama and others, many politicians have embraced the use of selfies and social media films to attempt to ingratiate themselves with the electorate.
One recent example was Rory Stewart , whose use of social media gained him attention during his short bid for the leadership of the UK Conservative Party. But while such tactics can mobilise supporters, manage impressions, and amplify political messages, it also means political campaigns become more superficial.
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