Wendt versus Pollock: Toward visual semiotics in the discipline of IR theory
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Serdar Güner
Abstract
We focus on a key IR Theory article by Alexander Wendt (1992) and two Jackson Pollock paintings. Our aim is to identify meanings Pollock’s art communicates and reveals for Wendt (1992). It derives from an appeal to visual imagination and a desire for semiotic interpretation of Constructivist view of anarchy. The visual sign is an association such that there is Wendt’s theoretical claim on the one hand and an abstract painting on the other. We do not gaze at Wendt’s claim, we read it. We do not read a painting, look at it. This remark does not imply a one-way relationship. We can argue that a specific painting comes to life in our mind where colored movements are inextricably mixed up when we read the constructivist claim. Both Pollock paintings selected for our sign-making effort confirm the dynamic character of Constructivism and reveal not only three but countlessly many anarchies in international relations. They foment our assessments of abrupt changes of intersubjectivity among states. Cyclicality of dripped paints provides an anchor to fix Wendt’s anarchy conceptualization in these structural-abstract paintings. As to Wendt’s concept of anarchy, it acts as a helper, as a standard, against which interpretations of Pollock’s artwork construct meanings.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- The word revisited: Introducing the CogSens Model to integrate semiotic, linguistic, and psychological perspectives
- The symbolic usage of stone beyond its function as a construction material: Example of residential architecture in Iraqi Kurdistan
- Between interpretation and the subject: Revisiting Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony
- Indexicality, meaning, use
- Modèles logiques de la structure élémentaire de la signification: Templum, prisme sémiotique, carré sémiotique, cube sémiotique et autres
- The soundscape as the transformatrice in some Dene songs and stories
- Epistemic logic: All knowledge is based on our experience, and epistemic logic is the cognitive representation of our experiential confrontation in reality
- Saussure’s “anagrams”: A case of acousmatic mistaken identity?
- The imagination, the conscious, and the unconscious in Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête
- How actions and words come to make sense in a continuously changing world of work: A case study from software development
- Wendt versus Pollock: Toward visual semiotics in the discipline of IR theory
- RoboDoc: Semiotic resources for achieving face-to-screenface formation with a telepresence robot
- Book Review
- Review of Umberto Eco in his own words
