Visual Art, Ethical Witnessing, and Resistance

The chapter engages with another popular approach to visual international politics: visuals as a site of resistance to power, both through producing critical artwork and by ethically witnessing international crises. To trace these issues, the chapter analyzes the work of Ai Weiwei, a world-famous artist-activist whose ethical witnessing creatively resists China’s authoritarian party-state. It shows how Ai’s art presents ideological resistance to state power, in both the traditional sense of liberal resistance to authoritarian state oppression and the hermeneutical sense, in which it is necessary to decode his work for its “meaning” as the social construction of the visual. The chapter then considers how Ai’s documentary film Human Flow (2017) provokes transnational resistance through its “visual construction of the social”—and of the global. It thus examines how visual art can serve as an ethical witness to resist reigning political regimes, and how it also can excite affective communities of sense to creatively resist reigning political aesthetics. Chapter 6 thus highlights the need to appreciate the dynamic tension that entangles cultural governance and resistance.

Introduction

This introduction outlines the main theoretical, methodological, and empirical goals of the book, which are argued in more detail (and with more references) in later chapters. It explains how visual images need to be appreciated not just in terms of their ideological-value, but also in terms of their affect-work: not just what they mean, but also how they make us feel, both as individuals and as collectives. It outlines the book’s original analytical framework, which juxtaposes (1) the social construction of visual meaning with (2) the visual provocation of social orders, world orders, and “affective communities of sense.” It introduces the image/artifact distinction to explain why the book looks at both images (photographs, films, and art) and artifacts (maps, veils, walls, gardens, and cyberspace). Since much critical analysis is dominated by deconstructions of “Western” visual images, the introduction starts to examine how visuals from Asia and the Middle East challenge our understanding of international politics. It concludes with a summary of what the chapters cover.

Visibility, Visuality, and Mass (Self)Surveillance

Chapter 11 addresses a crossover domain in which images and artifacts co-exist in surveillance. It turns the question of visibility around: not just what we see, but how we are seen, including how we are constituted through various gazes. While most analyses of surveillance look to technology and security, this chapter explores the “culture of surveillance,” in which surveillance is an interactive practice of social-ordering and world-ordering. It traces the politics of surveillance through an analysis of historical and social trends in China and Euro-America: the pre-modern society of sovereignty, the modern society of discipline, and the contemporary networked society of control. It thus compares how surveillance provokes censorship, self-discipline, and creative social-ordering. Chapter 11 concludes that these are political rather than technical or cultural issues, and that they pose problems for both democratic societies and authoritarian states. It thus uses non-Western concepts and experiences to explore the sensible politics of visual artifacts.

Gardens in Diplomacy, War, and Peace

Chapter 10 continues the exploration of how visual artifacts can be sensory spaces and infrastructures of feeling that provoke unexpected affective communities of sense. It examines gardens as social constructions of social-ordering and world-ordering that both shape and participate in international politics. It questions how we use peace/war to understand international politics and argues that the “civility/martiality” dynamic is better for grasping such social-ordering and world-ordering performances. It develops civility/martiality to explore the sensible politics of how two key national war memorial sites—China’s Nanjing Massacre Memorial and Japan’s Yasukuni Shrine—work as gardens to perform international politics in unexpected ways. The conclusion considers how civility/martiality is useful for understanding (and feeling) the sensible politics of other key national memorial spaces, such as the National September 11 Museum and Memorial in New York. As with film-making, here garden-building is theory-building: by producing new sites and sensibilities, it creatively shapes our understanding of international politics.

Visualizing Security, Order, and War

This chapter critically examines another important approach to visual international politics: securitization theory, which argues that visual images can shape foreign policy events through their immediacy, circulation, and ambiguity. It uses the North Korea-US national security crisis provoked by the feature film The Interview (2014) to question securitization’s focus on the state, official elites, and the close relationship between existential threats and security problems. It then introduces the cultural governance/resistance conceptual dynamic to examine how Islamic State videos witnessed the creation not just of a sovereign state, but also of a new social order/world order: the transnational utopia of the Caliphate. Chapter 5 thus shows the visibility strategy’s hermeneutic approach to reading visual securitization and the visuality strategy’s attention to the broader issues of how social-ordering and world-ordering images can provoke affective communities of sense. It introduces and develops the cultural governance/resistance dynamic that is used in later chapters.

Methods, Ethics, and Filmmaking

This short introduction explains how Part II, “Visual Images,” engages with existing debates in visual international politics through chapters addressing the aesthetic turn in international relations (Chapter 4), visual securitization (Chapter 5), and ethical witnessing (Chapter 6). To make these arguments, it uses a range of visual images—photographs, documentary films, feature films, online videos, and visual art—to discuss visuality/visibility, ideology/affect, and cultural governance/resistance. Using these examples, Part II examines how visual culture studies and visual IR have used the visibility strategy to deconstruct visual images in order to reveal their hidden ideology. It argues that while exploring important issues, this research agenda is also limited by its hermeneutic mode of analysis and by its narrow focus on Euro-American images of security, war, and atrocity. It seeks to push beyond this verbally-inflected mode of analysis to see not just what images mean, but what they can “do” in provoking affective communities of sense. Part II thus employs comparative analysis and critical aesthetics to juxtapose concepts, practices, and experiences from different times and places.

Maps, Space, and Power

This introduction explains how the chapters in Part III, “Visual Artifacts and Sensory Spaces” move beyond existing debates in visual IR to see how visual artifacts can provoke a different kind of sensible politics. The chapters highlight a broad range of visual and multisensory experiences—making maps, wearing a veil, building a wall, enjoying a garden, surfing the Web—to argue that visual artifacts not only mean things, but also can “do” things and “make” things in nonnarrative, multisensory, and performative ways. It develops the concept of “visual artifacts” and stresses how Asian and Middle Eastern concepts, practices, and experiences can aid us in understanding sensible politics both beyond Eurocentrism and within Euro-America. Part III thus argues that to understand social theory and international politics, we need to expand from analysis of visual images to appreciate visual artifacts as material modalities and sensory spaces.

Conclusion

The book’s conclusion considers how the author’s filmmaking and garden-building experiences reframe questions of theory, method, and ethics. It recounts how using the visibility and the visuality strategies to examine images and artifacts from Euro-America, the Middle East, and Asia allows us to address questions of ideology and affect in interesting ways. It argues that we need to think beyond critical IR’s focus on inside/outside and self/Other as sites of identity, security, and exclusion to better appreciate how visuals engage in broader projects of social-ordering and world-ordering. While it is common to respond to the challenges of the “post-truth” era by deconstructing “fake news,” the conclusion argues that political critique also needs to creatively produce films that, for example, move and connect people to creatively build affective communities of sense to fight such populism. Although the book focuses on visual IR to critique verbal-textual modes of analysis, it concludes that we need to also expand from our focus on the visual to appreciate multisensory IR, while reconsidering the role of the verbal/multisensory dynamic in international politics. Finally, it argues that it’s best not to frame sensible politics as a subdiscipline of IR, because sensible politics can serve as an oblique entry into broader considerations of social theory and international studies.

Walls as Barriers, Gateways, and the Sublime

Chapter 9 continues the exploration of how visual artifacts can be sensory spaces and infrastructures of feeling that provoke unexpected affective communities of sense. It is common to criticize post–Cold War walls, especially the US-Mexico barrier and Israel’s West Bank barrier, as ineffective and immoral. This chapter, however, problematizes such arguments by using the unlikely juxtaposition of the Great Wall of China and the conceptual dynamics of gaps and loosening/tightening to explore (1) how walls can be a rational security policy; (2) how they are not simply barriers, but can be complex gateways for flows; and (3) how they are not simply texts waiting to be decoded—they are also sites of nonnarrative and nonlinear affective experience that can even excite the sublime. This critical juxtaposition of walls first explores what walls can tell us about the politics of borders, identity, and foreign policy, then considers how, as infrastructures of feeling, walls are examples not simply of ideology, but also of the affective experience of horror and wonder.

The Sartorial Engineering of Race, Gender, and Faith

Chapter 8 continues the exploration of how visual artifacts can provoke unexpected affective communities of sense. It explores visual body politics through the unlikely juxtaposition of young women (1) wearing Islamic veils and (2) participating in beauty pageants. These two practices are exemplary cases of the visibility strategy, especially where veil-wearing’s invisibility tactic makes women hypervisible. The chapter uses the conceptual dynamic of concealing/revealing to analyze how various groups—women and men, states and corporations—expend resources performing, policing, and resisting such sartorial practices. Using examples from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, the chapter first decodes how many women see it as an individual choice, then considers how the male gaze and the white/colonial gaze can shape these choices. Finally, the chapter examines how these sartorial performances visually construct the social and the international: you don’t just take the veil, the veil also takes you, in an experience that is creative as well as disciplinary. Because these are not just visual performances, but also involve touch, the chapter develops the idea of visual artifacts as material modalities and multisensory spaces.