AbstractsPolitical Science

What implications, if any, has the growing ubiquity of visual images had for state security practices and behaviors? To answer this question, this paper considers how social scientists should treat visual imagery as a causal variable in its own right. Of the two literatures that have seriously considered the implications that the visual has for IR, one treats it as an intervening variable and leaves it both under-conceptualized and deeply entangled with the discourse variable (the “CNN-effect”), while the other argues that visual images have no effects apart from the discursive practices that render them intelligible (the “discursive approach”). To date, no study has treated visual imagery as the independent variable. It is argued below that the independent effect that visual imagery enjoys finds its source in the sense experience that it produces in the human subject. Certain sense experiences will elicit universally shared responses from human beings. How an event or object appears is argued to constrain what it can mean.