CONTENTS INTRODUCTION to COSMOPOLITANISM AS CRITICAL and CREATIVE PRACTICE Eleanor Byrne and Berthold Schoene, Page 2
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CONTENTS INTRODUCTION TO COSMOPOLITANISM AS CRITICAL AND CREATIVE PRACTICE Eleanor Byrne and Berthold Schoene, page 2 THE WORLD ON A TRAIN: GLOBAL NARRATION IN GEOFF RYMAN’S 253 Berthold Schoene, page 7 THE PRECARIOUS ECOLOGIES OF COSMOPOLITANISM Marsha Meskimmon, page 15 ‘HOW DARE YOU RUBBISH MY TOWN!’: PLACE LISTENING AS AN APPROACH TO SOCIALLY ENGAGED ART WITHIN UK URBAN REGENERATION CONTEXTS Elaine Speight, page 25 TOWARDS A COSMOPOLITAN CRITICALITY? RELATIONAL AESTHETICS, RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA AND TRANSNATIONAL ENCOUNTERS WITH PAD THAI Renate Dohmen, page 35 PARALLEL EDITING, MULTI-POSITIONALITY AND MAXIMALISM: COSMOPOLITAN EFFECTS AS EXPLORED IN SOME ART WORKS BY MELANIE JACKSON AND VIVIENNE DICK Rachel Garfield, page 46 OFFSHORE COSMOPOLITANISM: READING THE NATION IN RANA DASGUPTA’S TOKYO CANCELLED, LAWRENCE CHUA’S GOLD BY THE INCH AND ARAVIND ADIGA’S THE WHITE TIGER Liam Connell, page 60 TRICK QUESTIONS: COSMOPOLITAN HOSPITALITY Eleanor Byrne, page 68 GOOGLE PAINTINGS John Timberlake, page 78 Banner image: Maya Freelon Asante, Time Lapse, 2010, tissue paper sculpture, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Morton Fine Art, Washington, DC. www.mayafreelon.com. OPEN ARTS JOURNAL, ISSUE 1, SUMMER 2013 ISSN 2050-3679 www.openartsjournal.org 2 COSMOPOLITANISM AS Especially since 9/11 cosmopolitanism has asserted itself as a counterdiscursive response to globalisation CRITICAL AND CREATIVE and a critical methodology aimed at counterbalancing PRACTICE: the ongoing hegemony of what in The Cosmopolitan Vision Ulrich Beck has termed ‘the national outlook’. AN INTRODUCTION Invoking a world threatened by global risks Beck calls on communities to reconceive their nationalist Eleanor Byrne and Berthold Schoene, self-identification by opening up and contributing to Manchester Metropolitan University global culture with ‘[their] own language and cultural symbols’ (Beck, 2006, p.21). The new cosmopolitanism Has cosmopolitanism become uncontroversial? As a promotes a departure from nationally demarcated and concept it seems endlessly flexible and suits almost compartmentalised views of the world. However, keen everybody while offending no one in particular. If to avoid imposing a new universalism, it stresses the we are all citizens of the world already, and nobody indispensability of local diversity and difference for the would seriously want to contest this, then is there propagation of any sustainable world-communal future. still a need to plead for a cosmopolitan outlook, a As the world finds itself increasingly disempowered cosmopolitan inflection to political decisions taken at by globalisation’s seeming intractability, any meaningful national and international levels, or by international political intervention becomes ever harder to initiate. bodies? Clearly, for peoples yet to access even national Presumably this is where, as a means of potential recognition in an international arena, the injunctions of resistance to globalisation, cosmopolitanism as an a cosmopolitan commitment in a globalised world are ethically informed geopolitical discourse could gain urgent and risky in equal measure. Numerous examples considerable momentum. Such an understanding of might demonstrate this point. For instance, on 29 cosmopolitanism as dissent is not without its critics. November 2012, the United Nations General Assembly Timothy Brennan, for example, identifies the new voted to upgrade the status of the Palestinians to that cosmopolitanism as ‘a veiled Americanism’ (Brennan, of a ‘non-member observer state’. This followed a bid 2001, p.682). He refers to it dismissively as ‘cosmo- to join the international body as a full member state in theory’ which, in his view, does little more than 2011, which failed, due to a lack of support in the UN provide glib rhetorical copy for economic globalisation, Security Council.1 The long-term effects of this decision and the cultural oppression and exploitation that are as yet unknowable. Palestinians may now participate accompany it. ‘Globalization bears on cosmopolitanism in General Assembly debates, and their chances of as structure to idea’, Brennan asserts. ‘It is that joining UN agencies and the International Criminal purportedly new material reality to which the new Court have improved. But conversely the Israeli ethos – cosmopolitanism – responds’ (2001, p.662). response to the vote has been to withhold $120 million What Brennan’s critique exposes is cosmopolitanism’s worth of funds from Palestine and initiate aggressive enmeshment in the operations of neoliberal capitalism settlement projects in East Jerusalem. Importantly, and Americanisation, which pursue not smooth cosmopolitanism advocates that we have conversations worldwide homogenisation, let alone democratic across borders, and that in these conversations the popular equivalence, but quite simply reinscribe the rights of both parties to speak are universally regarded centuries-old exploitative core-periphery relations as self-evident. of Western imperialism. Whereas in the twenty- Cosmopolitanism is traditionally defined either with first century capital has indeed gone cosmopolitan, reference to its late eighteenth-century Kantian legacy in political, social and cultural terms transnational as world citizenship facilitated by international trade exchange remains largely a one-way system, legislation or, in its more contemporary manifestation, segregating the proverbial global village into enclaves of as ‘a form of radicalism that has flourished since the unprecedented security and affluence, on the one hand, fall of the Berlin Wall’ (Fine, 2003, p.452) driven less and increasingly anomic ghettoes of terror, cultural by economic interests and bourgeois self-realisation dislocation and economic hardship, on the other. than an egalitarian cosmopolitics informed by a strong Brennan’s critique zooms in on one particular ethical sense of world-communal commitment. manifestation of cosmopolitanism, namely the American academy’s embrace of the Clinton Administration’s 1 ‘Palestinians win upgraded UN status by wide margin’, new market globalism, which was soon matched by BBC News Middle East, 30 November 2012, http://www.bbc. Tony Blair’s coinage of a political ‘Third Way’. This new co.uk/news/world middle east 20550864 (accessed 3 January market globalism set out to marry neoliberalism’s 2013). OPEN ARTS JOURNAL, ISSUE 1, SUMMER 2013 ISSN 2050-3679 www.openartsjournal.org 3 ‘free market’ agenda to social responsibility and commitment, Yuracko falls prey to a common fallacy commitment, keen to design a roadmap for exiting fairly widespread among US American academics, which the rampant monetarist turbo-capitalism to which, is to conflate cosmopolitanism with neoliberalism. This according to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, overlooks and indeed disingenuously obfuscates the there was no alternative. Under Clinton and Blair irresolvable tensions between Western consumerist globalisation appeared to develop a social conscience, individualism, on the one hand, and the pursuit of pan- and Brennan is right to point out that many American global cosmopolitical equivalence, on the other. intellectuals fell for the allure of this expertly-spun Originally an economic doctrine championing the fantasy of bringing progress and prosperity to the new free market and wary of any form of state intervention, post-Cold War world. Unfortunately, not only did they neoliberalism has come to equate political liberty with fail to recognise the manifold ways in which this so- economic freedom, making the latter the primary called Washington Consensus massively exacerbated foundation of a free and prosperous society. Opposed the same old inequalities both at home and worldwide, to the post-World War II welfare state, which was they also took for granted the consolidation of global built on the premise that markets must be regulated, American hegemony that inevitably ensued. According by taxes and labour rights, to ensure social justice and to Brennan, the kind of cosmopolitanism endorsed in mobility, neoliberalism rose to worldwide hegemony this work made a significant contribution to America’s in the 1980s under the political reign of Reagan and systematic ‘transform[ation of] the kosmos into their Thatcher. Neoliberalism’s acutely self-centred view [own] polis’, as Sheldon Pollock memorably put it of the human is memorably expressed in Thatcher’s (Pollock, 2002, p.25). But should one really allow declaration of 1987 that ‘there is no such thing as this errant variant of cosmopolitanism, specific to society! There are individual men and women and there a particular group in a particular place and time, to are families and no government can do anything except disqualify for good any other possible manifestations of through people and people look to themselves first’ cosmopolitical engagement? (Thatcher, 1987). Not without irony, neoliberalism’s One major objective of our special issue is ascent appears to have been fuelled by the legacy of to explore the impact, and impact-generating the countercultural 1960s, which had taught a whole potential, of cosmopolitanism within both critical generation to regard individual freedom and self- and creative practice. Can cosmopolitanism be realisation as life’s most pressing pursuits. According retrieved from being seen as a mere by-product of to Tony Judt, ‘what united the ‘60s generation was not globalisation, a philosophy or – more appropriately the interest of all, but the needs and rights of each’, – a lifestyle