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Introduction
- University of Michigan Press
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Introduction The ‹eld of International Relations often regards powerful nation-states as rather stagnant entities, robust in their ability to maintain authority and relative control over time and space. This is not without good reason , of course, as these actors possess an enormous ability to in›uence others in international politics and, more pressingly, deploy a substantial amount of organized violence. This static assumption is usually understood with reference to their material or strategic position in the global order, and their decline is brought about by challenges from other actors , through free riding or through force (Kennedy 1987; Gilpin 1981). To this end, the ‹elds of international relations and international history have helpfully established the manner in which international actors can challenge those in authority through “balancing” behavior (Spykman 1942; Waltz 1979; Walt 1987). These challenges do, however, take substantial periods of time—decades, even centuries—to emerge. Further, if the material and strategic capabilities of states constitute the “power” that serves to deter would-be challengers, why do the most powerful states or ideologies appear to be so routinely challenged? Why do these actors perceive their supremacy to be under constant challenge? Why do they appear to be so caught up with their self-image? How does power in this way facilitate its own challenges? There is another type of insecurity that the powerful in international politics face—an aesthetic insecurity over appearances. This insecurity is more frequent, localized, and public. These instances where centralized bodies of power, including nation-states, react to aesthetically problematic representations have been underanalyzed by IR scholars. While they do not lead to substantial shifts in global distributions of power, this book advances the claim that these moments of aesthetic insecurity are still worthy of study, if we understand these reactions to be a logical tendency of power itself. In doing so, the book posits the possibility that processes other than state-based balancing can manipulate centralized bodies of power, stimulating them into new modes of behavior. Because these bodies brand themselves aesthetically and because their citizens or group members draw intrinsic psychological, rhythmic, and imaginative satisfaction from such constructions, they can be manipulated through what is advanced in this book as counterpower, moments when those aesthetic visions are challenged or ruptured. Though examples are drawn from the aesthetically created Self of U.S. power for illustration, the broader implication of the argument is that all bodies of centralized power can be countered aesthetically or ontologically insecuritized through counterpower. In a nutshell, I argue in this book that centralized power, including but not limited to national power, recognizes its own ability to self-create; that the aesthetic construction of this ontology is engaged by collective bodies of citizens; and that when such a construction is de-aestheticized, these bodies react in quick and sometimes problematically violent ways. To position this argument, let me clarify a couple of preliminary issues . First, what is meant here by the “Self” of power and nations? The term may seem a bit jarring to readers unfamiliar with the debates over the notion of a “Self” of groups or nation-states. My previous work (Steele 2008a) and the debates that in part inspired it1 grappled with the problems and bene‹ts of ascribing the human Self and its biological, psychological , and sociological drives to corporate actors such as the nationstate . These meditations have hardly resolved this debate, and the current book will do no better in satisfying those skeptics who ‹nd it analytically problematic to ascribe individual Selves to the nation-state or other corporate bodies. Nevertheless, we can recognize colloquially how we talk everyday about corporate actors as if they are people, as in “France recognized the Armenian genocide,” “Did you see what Israel is doing in Gaza?” or “Apple introduced a new iPod today!”2 This does not assume that they are “real” people by any means, but as corporate actors, they engage in practices that are real and observable, and these practices occur in what one scholar terms “contested zones of ongoing debate [rather] than physical spaces” (Jackson 2004: 285). Sometimes we go a 2 • defacing power 1. See special issue, Review of International Studies 30, no. 2 (2004). 2. Alexander Wendt (2005) has made this point more forcefully than I ever could, in his response to Peter Lomas’s (2005) critique of state personhood. [54.85.255.74] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 10:14 GMT) bit further, ascribing a motive to these actors, again as...