Music as Method: Interventions and Practices of Popular Culture in World Politics
When International Relations scholars have looked at popular culture, they have tended to examine examples of popular culture, however defined, to see how they represent or critique “real world” problems: the “zombies in IR” genre is typical. When examples of popular culture are examined as practices, rather than artefacts, these practices have typically been understood as staging interventions, blurring the boundaries between culture and politics. The contributions such interventions might make to critical theory remain underexplored. Christopher Small’s assertion of music as a verb, rather than an object, opens perspectives on culture as an approach to, rather than representation of, world politics. Musicking could thus be seen as a method and methodology for world politics, bridging affective, phenomenological approaches that emphasise affect and the body in politics with political economic approaches that foreground the social relations of production that make a music event possible. Such an approach extends beyond a narrowly epistemological understanding of theoretical critique to find the material grounds on which social orders are policed and through which alternatives can emerge.
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