Umdoistres

Review of International Studies (2008), 34, 137–153 Copyright  British International Studies Association

doi:10.1017/S0260210508007833

Popular visual language as global communication: the remediation of United Airlines Flight 93
CYNTHIA WEBER*

Abstract. This article argues that while the linguistic turn in mainstream IR is important in broadening how IR approaches global communications, the linguistic turn has its limitations because mainstream IR tends to, in Mattelart’s terms, ‘ex-communicate’ the visual from the linguistic. This is highly problematic, considering, firstly, that popular visual language is increasingly the language that amateurs and experts rely upon in order to claim contemporary literacy and, secondly, that much politics is conducted through popular visual language. If the challenge of this Special Issue is to think about how to bring the discipline of IR to meaningful, political life, then a very good place to start is by asking mainstream IR (again) to take popular visual language seriously as an important aspect of contemporary global communication. This article makes this demand of the discipline of IR. It does so by presenting a case-study – the official US remediation of United Airlines Flight 93 – as an illustration of how contemporary global communications move from the textual to the visual and of what is lost in not taking this move seriously. In particular, it claims that by failing to analyse popular visual language as integral to global communications, mainstream IR risks misunderstanding contemporary subjectivity, spatiality, and temporality.

Introduction More than a generation ago, the discipline of International Relations took the linguistic turn marked by the introduction of ‘discourse analysis’ to bear on core questions of international relations. Celebrated by some,1 resisted by others,2 and mainstreamed by still others,3 the linguistic turn reinvigorated IR scholarship. But it had its limitations. Practised in IR