Visuality and IR [coming back from the SGIR conference in Stockholm]

The 7th conference of the Standing Group in International Relations was held in Stockholm, Sweden. Entitled with “Politics in Hard Time: International Relations Responses to the Financial Crisis” it consisted of a variety of sections addressing not only economic and political issues, but also questions of popular culture and visuality.

I attended an interesting panel on popular culture and IR, including papers on comics (Marco Lehti), the movie The Aristocrats (Jennifer Sterling-Folker), Battlestar Gallactica (Patrick T. Jackson), and a Bourdieun approach to popular culture in general (Anna Leander). While all presentations were highly inspiring, I was wondering why the visual and visuality itself played a relatively marginal part in every talk. A movie, for example, includes quite different relations and forms of time and space, light and figuration, even text than a comic. Genres rely on different conventions, make use of different techniques and include various inter-textual citations.

An image not only consists of a medium (paper, celluloid, digital codes …) – the materiality of the image - but also of relations between space, perspective and light (mostly seen as color), its inherent rules and conventions of visioning. Being part of at least one genre, it might include symbols, icons and inter-textual relations, for example when a lightened candle is known to symbolize the presence of god. All these aspect are referring to something we can call the “idiom of an image”. Interpreting visuality, then, might be highly dependent on learning and understanding such idioms, including questions of (visual) memory and (visual) knowledge.

However, most of the time images don not appear separately but are used in combination with type or text, for example in newspapers. Such a relation between figuration and typography constitutes an additional image we are able to perceive as a social or cultural field of practices (e.g. reading newspapers). We know how to read a newspaper, to detect the contentious relations between the photos, graphics on the one hand and the columns and letters on the other hand. Type and image sum up to a powerful representation shaping our knowledge about the war in Afghanistan, for example.

I came back from Stockholm and realized that the way we see and conceptualize seeing as a central practice of our everyday life might have a closer relation to modern life and Modernity as I thought before. Using a perspective mostly implies to appropriate something or someone without being noticed by the objects of our visual desire. The perspective, i.e. the dominance of an authoritative view might then be understandable as a symbolic manifestation of Modernity which is quite different from alternative “visual idioms” in so called non-Western parts of the globe. If, however, a perspective always comes with the danger of mastering then how could we imagine a critical methodology in order to understand visuality?