Examining the ways in which art works as a space of representation, Ernst van Alphen argues for “aesthetics of art as agency”. In this paper, I look at this argument analogically vis-à-vis the textual products of International Relations (IR). I argue that IR texts too are agentive in themselves. As spaces of representation, they form spaces of the political, brought alive in contextualised moments of reading. The political agency of the text thus derives from the relations that the text, as a text, is capable of forming, insinuating, meddling and perhaps even destroying, each and every time it becomes read.
In academic writing, the logico-scientific form is the norm. So as to uncover the aesthetic agency of the logico-scientific text, I revisit van Alphen’s arguments about art as a space of representation. Utilising his discussion of the linear perspective I argue that, even though the logico-scientific text seems uninviting of aesthetic experience, it should not be understood as entirely non-aesthetic either. Comparing the subject positions of a reader of the logico-scientific text and a viewer of linear perspective in visual art, I suggest that IR texts operate with a particular kind of aesthetic logic. Here, the text provides a linear perspective of a kind, which provides the reader with an objectivist illusion of completeness, thereby erasing the reader’s own sensual engagement with the space in which s/he operates while reading the text. This, I argue, forms the cannily constructed aesthetic agency of social scientific text form, where the aesthetic understanding of the reader is activated by its being lured into a stage of deactivation. The main locus of my argument is that we need to recognise all texts as aesthetic spaces of the political. Here, the reader needs to remain alert.
