Description
Popular culture is an increasingly respectable field in the study of world politics. While having debated how popular culture ‘matters’ for world politics, most IR scholarship still treats reality and fiction as two distinct orders of representation. We argue that because of the secrecy surrounding intelligence services’ activities, the reality/fiction binary is untenable with regards to producing knowledge within and about it. Funded by the French Ministry of Defence, the spy-thriller series Le Bureau des légendes has been acclaimed by intelligence practitioners for its realistic depiction of the French external intelligence agency DGSE and the foreign countries it interacts with. Drawing on poststructuralist and visual approaches to IR, we argue that the series – as a mouthpiece of the French intelligence community – combines two major French social theorists, Derrida and Latour, in a soft power move that theorises intelligence practice around the concept of legend. The legend is both a story asserted as true and a description that makes a map intelligible. Through case studies of the series’ portrayal of Russia and of technology, we explore how it deconstructs the French Self and the binaries of good/evil, national/foreign, true/fabricated. Actor-network theory (ANT) helps showing the DGSE as superior in its collaboration with nonhuman objects, technologies, languages, cultures and places, in an explicit comparison with the American CIA. Combining these insights, we suggest that Le Bureau des légendes is not a fictional representation of intelligence, but is, in itself, an intelligence practice.
