From Interfaces to Interpretants: A Pragmatist Exploration into Popular Culture as International Relations

• Published in: Millennium 2009-12, Vol.38 (2), p.317-343
• Main Author: Kangas, Anni
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Academic disciplines; Interfaces; International relations; International relations theory; Methodology; Popular culture; Pragmatism; Reductionism; Research methodology; Research trends; Semiotics; World politics
• ISSN: 0305-8298; 1477-9021
• DOI: 10.1177/0305829809347510

Following the ‘aesthetic turn’ in International Relations (IR) the discipline has witnessed an upsurge of interest in new types of research material. Products of popular culture are one among these. Although works that articulate international relations with popular culture have yielded interesting research results, there is a need for sustained methodological and metatheoretical reflection. The article suggests that pragmatism would provide an untapped yet fruitful resource for this task. The unique value of pragmatism lies in the fact that it offers a solid metatheoretical basis for inquiries as well as a methodological solution. Metatheoretically, pragmatism has a specific contribution to make as it begins with practice, with the need to come to terms with the concrete facts of worldly existence. Instead of conceptualising international relations and popular culture as separate categories which form ‘interfaces’ with one another, pragmatism views them as dialectically related moments of semeiosis. Methodologically, this thought can be operationalised by way of analysing products of popular culture as a set of ‘interpretants’ — a term which designates one side of Charles S. Peirce’s sign theory’s triangular conception of the sign. The theory contains a set of distinctions which can be turned into a fruitful interrogative framework with the help of which it is possible to avoid forms of reductionism and to generate multidimensional explanations of international political phenomena.