Shock and awe: Power and the resistance of art

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 34, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 819-839

  Jabri, Vivienne ^a  

^a KING'S COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33748897767     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/03058298060340031601     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. See Roland Bleiker, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
2. For the way the early critical theorists engaged with these questions see the chapters by the authors below and Frederic Jameson, 'Reflections in Conclusion', in Ernst Bloch, George Lukacs, Bertold Brecht, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Ronald Taylor (London and New York: Verso, 1977).
3. Pierre Bourdieu, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997).
4. Kant's aesthetic theory is premised on a division between responses to the beautiful and responses to the sublime and appears in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley, LA, and London: University of California Press, 1960)
5. and his Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978) which retains much of his earlier discussion on the sublime. Lyotard's reading of Kant's aesthetic theory takes from Kant the idea of the sublime as being located beyond representation and yet seeks to 'find' the sublime in 'postmodern' art.
6. See his The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). That aesthetic judgement suggests' disinterestedness' points to Kant's view that the exercise of such judgement is independent of any reference to the world as such.
7. See Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991).
8. For a recent review of the various approaches to the concept of power in International Relations, see Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, 'Power in International Politics', International Organisation 59 (2005): 39-75.
9. Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico Press, 1999), 234.
10. See, for example, Hal Foster, 'Postmodernism in Parallax', October 63 (1993): 8.
11. 'Shock and Awe' as a military doctrine was introduced into US military thinking by Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade. See their 'Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance' (National Defence University, 1996).
12. Walter Benjamin, 'The Storyteller', in Illuminations, 84.
13. Kant, Observations on the Beautiful and the Sublime, 26.
14. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
15. Lyotard, 'The Sublime and the Avante Garde', in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 197,
16. quoted in Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1994), 582.
17. See Martin Jay's discussion of Lyotard's evocation of the Kantian sublime in his Downcast Eyes, 582-6.
18. William Connolly's critique of positivist Political Science, with its emphasis on rendering concepts such as power 'operational', is relevant here. See his Terms of Political Discourse (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1983).
19. See Jenny Edkins's powerful essay, 'Politics, Subjectivity, and Depoliticization', in her Poststructuralism and International Relations: Bringing the Political Back In (Boulder, CO, and London: Lynne Rienner, 1999), 1-20.
20. See Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).
21. The absence of the body in International Relations is highlighted by David Campbell and Michael Dillon in their essay, 'The end of philosophy and the end of international relations', in David Campbell and Michael Dillon (eds.), The Political Subject of Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993).
22. Clearly, feminist thought in International Relations is also significant in bringing the body into the 'frame', so to speak. See, for example, Christine Sylvester, Feminist International Relations: An Unfinished Journey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
23. Discussions of war that take injured bodies seriously are nowhere more clearly elaborated than in Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
24. While International Relations may seek to somehow abstract thought from the realm of bodies, military and strategic thinking, as Michael Shapiro points out, is precisely based on a distinct way of 'seeing' bodies. Shapiro draws on Giorgio Agamben when he refers to the 'ocular enmity' that determines decisions relating to 'protected versus expendable bodies'. See Michael Shapiro, 'The Fog of War', Security Dialogue 36, no. 2 (2005): 235.
25. As Michel Foucault shows all too clearly in his Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (London and New York: Routledge, 1989).
26. A number of authors in International Relations have discussed this negation of the body in International Relations discourses. See, for example, Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Meaning of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
27. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France 1981-1982, ed. Frederic Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 17.
28. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 19.
29. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 14-15.
30. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1979), 82-4.
31. See Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1988),
32. and Michel Foucault, 'The Subject and Power', in Foucault, Power, vol. 3 of the Essential Works, ed. James D. Faubion (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2000).
33. See especially Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (London: Penguin, 1977).
34. Michel Foucault, Abnormal, Lectures at the College de France 1974-1975, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2003), 82.
35. Michel Foucault, Abnormal, 83.
36. Ullman and Wade's historical references are the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nakasaki. On audacity as a distinguishing element of 'shock and awe', reference must be made to Ullman's explication of his strategy to The Guardian. This referred to the ancient Chinese warrior Sun-Tzu: 'Sun Tzu was hired by the Emperor as a general, and instead of an interview, the emperor told him to teach his concubines to march. Because if he could do that he could do anything. So Sun Tzu said, "Do I have complete control?" The emperor said yes. So he told them to march, and the concubines just laughed. Then he summoned the head concubine and cut off her head. Then they marched.' Interviewed in The Guardian, 25 March 2005.
37. See Martin Jay, Refractions of Violence (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 164.
38. See Martin Jay's discussion of Kant's aesthetic theory in his Downcast Eyes, 582-3.
39. For a discussion of Kristeva's notion of the subject in process in the context of aesthetics and politics, see Vivienne Jabri, 'Restyling The Subject of Responsibility in International Relations', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 27, no. 3 (1998): 591-611.
40. See Julia Kristeva's, Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
41. Doris van Drothen, 'The heartbeat of drawing: On the circulation between performance, sculpture and painting', in Rebecca Horn: Bodylandscapes (London: Hayward Gallery, 2005), 139.
42. Doris van Drothen, in Rebecca Horn: Bodylandscapes, 138-9.
43. Deleuze, Foucault.
44. Jeannette Winterson in The Guardian, 23 May 2005. Accessed at [www.jeanettewinterson.com/pages/context/index.asp?PageID=324].
45. Doris Von Drathen, 'The heartbeat of drawing', 132.
46. Armin Zweite, 'Rebecca Horn's Bodylandscapes: Ten observations about the race of feelings and drawing in post-mechanical times', in Rebecca Horn: Bodylandscapes, 13.
47. Ibid., 19.
48. See David Campbell, Politics without Principle: Sovereignty, Ethics and the Narratives of the Gulf War (Boulder, CO and London: Lynne Rienner, 1993).
49. Martin Jay, Refractions of Violence, 174.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid., 175.
52. Susan Buck Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe
53. Ibid., 255.