The Art of Rendering Visible: Social Forces and Political Change in the (Un)Making of the International

IPS is an art of rendering visible. What is made invisible by the disciplinary boundaries that otherwise structure understandings of the international, political, and social is brought to light through the conceptual and empirical work that for the past two decades has appeared in this journal. Rendering visible differs from analyzing what is already visible. In contrast to the latter, the former task resists a representational logic that settles for particular depictions of a generalized situation. Instead of representation, focus shifts to expression, and attempts to express social forces in the continuous (un)making of the international. To develop this reading, the article explores the role of expression in art and specifically the figural art of Francis Bacon. Themes of distortion and deformation of the human face and body are, together with Bacon’s use of the triptych, drawn on to show how rendering visible does not amount to representation or illustration, but rather aims to produce disruptions through concentrations of reality. Exploring this approach further, the article turns to Sweden’s “new” security situation as an example of how to render visible changing constellations of forces, their disruptive impact, and deformative effects on entanglements of the international, political, and social.