Fortunately, Roland Bleiker, a prolific Swiss-Australian political scientist based at the University of Queensland, begs to differ. His latest monograph is a spirited yet remarkably humble defence of the heretical idea that the future of international relations as a vigorous academic discipline depends on the willingness of its representatives to take a radical ‘aesthetic turn’. Designed not to replace conventional social-science methodology but to complement it with the aesthetic wisdom drawn from every cultural tradition and geographical region of our crisis-ridden planet, Bleiker’s intellectual vision unfolds in exemplary lucid prose in two main parts.

The first section of the book seeks to explain why aesthetic approaches offer important new ways of understanding world politics. Leaving behind this insider’s discussion directed at obstinate colleagues in the subfield of international relations theory, the second part of the book contains down-to-earth case studies, selected to demonstrate how concrete aesthetic insight can give us new perspectives on key political problems such as war, genocide, authoritarianism, and poverty. Moving from Stalinist Russia to postwar Germany, from Cold War Eastern Europe to Chile and contemporary South Korea, these case studies reveal the imagination and creativity of politically engaged poets: Paul Celan’s search for ‘thinking space’ in the immediate postwar period; the linguistic dissent of a group of East German poets in the decade leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall; Pablo Neruda’s struggle against prevailing linguistic habits in his quest for social justice in Latin America; Anna Akhmatova’s poetic passion for the preservation of critical historical memory; and Ko Un’s aesthetic efforts to contribute to national reconciliation after decades of turmoil and war on the Korean peninsula. In addition to summarising the main themes of the book, Bleiker’s conclusion offers an enlightening response to a critic’s request to explain how, precisely, one would go about writing ‘aesthetic world politics’ (a difficult ‘tightrope dance’, as Bleiker concedes).

To get a better sense of how well Bleiker manages to make his case for the greater inclusion of aesthetic approaches to the study of world politics, let us consider two brief examples, each drawn from the philosophical and applied sections of Aesthetics and World Politics. In the opening chapter, Bleiker confronts head-on the hegemony of ‘realism’ in international relations: that is, the view that the ‘facts’ of the ‘real world’ emerge only from the social-scientific search for ‘valid inferences’ by means of systematic (and usually quantitative) methods of inquiry. While acknowledging the usefulness of the scientific perspective in yielding instrumental knowledge of causal relationships, the author nonetheless objects to the dominant notion that the Holy Grail of international relations scholarship can be found in producing ever more exact representations of external political reality as it ‘really is’ – in other words, free of pregnant metaphors, poetic embellishments, and emotional outbursts.

For Bleiker, the dominance of such ‘mimetic’ methodologies in his discipline (based on the imitative representation of the ‘real world’) highlights how crucial issues of representation are to world politics. As he perceptively notes, the mimetic desire to represent ‘the real’ in terms of facts mirroring an ‘objective’ world does not pay enough attention to the complex and rather arbitrary relationship between the represented and its representation. Hence, Bleiker’s preference for ‘aesthetic’ approaches over purely mimetic perspectives on world politics: poets or painters always focus on the illusive but fertile gap between the represented and its representation.

Consider, for example, René Magritte’s famous painting of a pipe with a carefully hand-written line that reads, ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ (‘This is not a pipe’). This serves as a powerful reminder that the painting is not a pipe itself but only an artistic representation challenging the very notion of mimesis. Another example would be two different representations of war reality. One is mimetic, conveyed by corporate-media-produced television images of cruise missiles hitting nondescript buildings in Afghanistan. The aesthetic approach is reflected in a few lines that are part of one of Neruda’s famous poems on the Spanish Civil War: ‘Come see the blood in the streets, / come see the blood in the streets, / come see the blood in the streets!’

As Bleiker emphasises, the aesthetic alternative to mimesis relies on a broad register of sensibilities and insight, rather than being limited to the practices of logic and scientific reason that triumphed in the wake of the Enlightenment. Indeed, engaged poetry reveals that the inevitable difference between the represented and its representation is not a deficiency to be overcome by more precise mimetic models of world politics, but that the gap is the very (uncertain) location of politics itself.

To be sure, Bleiker acknowledges that to foreground the importance of the politics of representation is not to deny the existence of facts or a real world of war, trade, and technology. But he insists on subverting the mimetic goal of representing political reality in terms of a perfect semblance between signifier and signified with the aesthetic engagement of incommensurability, difference, and a multiplicity of sensibilities. For Bleiker, good poetry encourages the intrinsically political (and ethical) process of opening up to the very contingency and open-endedness that constitutes the inescapable fabric of our everyday lives. Call his aesthetic perspective ‘postmodern’ if you will, but recognise that it has, indeed, a place in the interpretation of global politics. In fact, it connects the members of the ‘engaged poets’ society’ who constitute the protagonists of Bleiker’s case studies assembled in the second part of his book.

Take Neruda, for example, who, despite his dogmatic Stalinism and persistent masculinism, managed to reach deeply into his poetic imagination to help us see old social dynamics in a new way, thus contributing to more critical and humane approaches to global politics. Bleiker draws beautifully from Neruda’s political poems composed during the Spanish Civil War to illustrate the power of aesthetics in disclosing the dialectics of violence and intense human suffering that swallows perpetrators and victims alike. Rather than merely producing mimetic mirror images of one of the most horrific civil wars of the twentieth century, Neruda’s poetry gives voice to those ordinary people caught up in world politics whose individual fates are far too complex and subtle to be recorded in the realist ledgers of world politics.

Refusing to forget what social science cannot represent, Neruda and Bleiker, in their own ways, remind all of us to keep alive aesthetic endeavours that may be incapable of telling us exactly what is right or wrong, but that nonetheless have the power to inspire us to engage in a politics that deserves to be called ‘ethical’:

Remember, Raul?

Remember it, Rafael?

Federico, under the ground

There, remember it?

Can you remember my house with the

balconies where

June drowned the dazzle of flowers in

your teeth?

(Neruda, ‘A Few Things Explained’)