Imagining the Cosmopolitan in Public and Professional Writing

Anne Surma

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137291318
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In this important book, Surma combines threads from ethical, political, communications, sociological, feminist and discourse theories to explore the impact of writing in a range of contexts and illustrate the ways in which it can strengthen social connections.

1

Introducing a Cosmopolitan Orientation to Writing

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

(Czesław Miłosz 1968, ‘Ars Poetica’)

I started gathering ideas for this book in 2008, working through sketchy notions about writers, writing and the relationship of both to global social change. I was mulling over the ways in which the notions of ethics, imagination and rhetoric, the concepts and the practices that have underpinned my work on public and professional writing, might be rethought and expanded on to take account of the forces influencing writing in an era of globalisation.

2008 was the year of Myanmar’s Cyclone Nargis, which killed up to 200,000 people; the Beijing Olympics; the election of Barack Obama as US president; the Iraqi journalist’s arrest for throwing his shoes at President George Bush, to name a noteworthy few. All of these were highly spectacular – dramatic, intense, singular – publicly mediated events, impressive for the immediate, emotive and sensory impacts of the modes through which they were realised, including vision, sound, colour and movement. In addition, the modality of written texts produced through innumerable forms (including journalistic, corporate, government, community and individual, academic and popular communications), genres and platforms (e.g. social media, electronic- and hard copy-based internal and external documents) also contributed, over a longer or shorter history, to producing and modifying the understanding of these as public events. Such texts have thus been integral to the extension of those events’ various levels of meaningfulness and perhaps ongoing significance to different readers and writers in diverse temporal, local and global contexts.

Further, it is through an evaluation of the written texts relating to these events and produced in different contexts and for different purposes that the depth and shade of the tensions, divergent meanings and interpretations of particular occasions may be exposed as well as defined. For example, Cyclone Nargis brought to the surface, through reports from bloggers, political commentators, governments, non-government and international coalitions, the difficulties of providing timely and effective humanitarian responses arising from a combination of Myanmar’s repressive regime, the international communities’ isolationist policies towards Myanmar, and the country’s widespread and wide-ranging needs for global humanitarian aid. ¹However, other texts also produced carefully articulated and educative responses to reductive understandings of Burmese local civic life under an authoritarian regime, and addressed conventional underestimations of the citizens’ agency in motivating change, particularly in times of crisis.²

In a different scenario and set of circumstances, yet for another country also popularly perceived by the Western world in particular as closed and distinctly alien, China’s Beijing Olympics signalled a dazzlingly spectacular exhibition of public exposure on a global stage. While the massive scale and the striking quality of the colour and movement that characterised the worldwide broadcasting of the opening and closing ceremonies may well remain the enduring image in the collective public memory of the games, countless other texts contributed to the myriad ways in which local and global communities enjoyed, boycotted, were indifferent to, marvelled at, were exploited by or profited from the occasion.³

Barack Obama’s election as US president became another globally historic event, and captured the attention of millions as a visual spectacle, most notably given his visible (racial and ethnic) difference from his predecessors. Also, however, the run-up to Obama’s election victory arguably constituted the first large-scale presidential campaign in which the Internet, particularly social media, and thus densely textualised, political communications were strategically deployed. The support thereby garnered via online platforms, including websites, blogging and Twitter, is considered to have been integral to his electoral success.⁴ Since 2008, Obama has faced various challenges to his leadership, perhaps none more bizarre than that disputing the authenticity of his claim to and official record of his US citizenship. A billboard campaign run in several states and sponsored by WND, an independent news website, with the slogan ‘Where’s the birth certificate?’ has had considerable influence in attempts to claim Obama is not a “real” American.⁵

By contrast, there was no doubt in the popular imagination that President George Bush had been an authentic representative, for good or ill (depending on your viewpoint), of the USA. Video footage captured by mainstream media, and redistributed via social platforms such as YouTube, of the Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi throwing his shoes at the outgoing president in protest at the US occupation in Iraq, during a press conference in Baghdad in December 2008, has been viewed millions of times by spectators all over the world. ⁶However, the same images of this highly visual moment of protest and resistance generated wildly disparate written and performative responses by international news media, social and political commentators and publics, ranging from its condemnation and treatment as a gross insult and a crime, to Al-Zaidi’s elevation to heroic status by many of his compatriots and other supporters.⁷

Despite their (at one level) arbitrary connection by means of chronology, the myriad writers documenting, contributing and responding to the evolution of the events described above were, whether self-consciously or not, putting into relief the textured and complex relations between ideas and practices of belonging and exclusion, similarity and difference, obligation and indifference, knowing and responding. As individuals differentiated by their relative positions of power, and their access to local and global readerships and interlocutors through various genres, modes and platforms, and their roles as autonomous or representative communicators, these writers have all had a part in influencing the ripples and patterns of change.

Globalisation and a cosmopolitan critique

The events the writers have helped develop and modify have also been, to a greater or lesser extent, produced and inflected by the phenomenon of globalisation – the accelerated movements and flows of people, finance, trade and services, and ideas and communications between and across state and continental boundaries. Globalisation is experienced and responded to differently by each of us, depending on our material situations, on the relationships which support and structure our lives and work, and on our relative capacity to exercise our agency and choices in terms of those movements and flows. In this sense, then, the boundaries transforming our lives are not only geographical, but also political, social and gendered, as patterns of human relationships in the family, at work, in local, state and global communities affect and are affected by globalising forces. Thus, for privileged individuals and communities, borders and boundaries may be opening up in exciting and perhaps also confronting and challenging ways. Conversely, for people who are disadvantaged or marginalised, those borders and boundaries (both their existence and possible transgression) may be experienced by turns as either constricting or protective.

The term that kept cropping up along this trail of my thinking and reading on the issues outlined above was cosmopolitanism. The last few decades have seen a revival in popular, intellectual and practical interest in cosmopolitanism – in its many, and sometimes contradictory, variants. When we refer to cosmopolitanism, both its suffix (-ism) and its singular form are misleading, since the concepts, the orientations and the practices comprising different renderings of cosmopolitanism today are neither stable, nor objective, nor universally agreed. However, before making some introductory comments on the form of critical cosmopolitanism on which this book is developed (and which I discuss more fully in the next chapter), it is worth briefly acknowledging the genealogy of the idea.

The term cosmopolitan derives from the Greek kosmopolitês, meaning “citizen of the world”, and all cosmopolitan perspectives admit some sense of the people around the globe inhabiting a form of shared community, whether that is one understood from ethical, political, legal, social or cultural standpoints, or a combination of those. The cosmopolitan thinking and philosophical and religious leanings of ancient civilisations – Greek, Roman, Chinese and then Islamic and Christian – all motivated approaches that cultivated ‘an inclusive vision of human community’ (Delanty 2009, 20), and an awareness of and sense of obligation to those who live beyond one’s own (familial, cultural national) groupings. Later, the revitalisation of cosmopolitan thought emerged during the Enlightenment, with Immanuel Kant its best known exponent, and evidenced in his work Perpetual Peace (1795). Here Kant argues that all rational beings are members of a single moral community, or ‘citizen[s] of a supersensible [moral] world’ (Kant in Kleingeld 2003, 301). In the nineteenth century, cosmopolitanism was derided by Marx and Engels as an ‘ideological reflection of capitalism’, emanating from the influence of capitalist globalisation and achieved on the back of working classes across the world. However, in this sense, and inversely, Marx and Engels implied that the proletariat was the means of achieving the ideal cosmopolitan society beyond the state (Kleingeld and Brown 2011).

In the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, there has been an exponential resurgence of attention to cosmopolitanism, and we have witnessed the development of that interest through various disciplinary, ideological and philosophical dispositions and domains. The spectrum is indeed broad: from cosmopolitan political theorists who are interested in the development of global democracy (such as David Held), to those who deliberate over ideas relating to universal norms of justice and/or the establishment of cosmopolitan legal institutions, regulatory frameworks and models of citizenship (such as Seyla Benhabib), to those who commend us to a universal moral vision (such as Martha Nussbaum), to more local or situated ethical understandings (such as Kwame Anthony Appiah), to those who explore the social and cultural (such as Ulrich Beck), communicative (Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart), and vernacular and visceral (Mica Nava) turns, to those who identify the cosmopolitan in literary (Rebecca Walkowitz), visual (Bronisław Szerszynski and John Urry) and media (Roger Silverstone) texts and practices.⁸

A critical cosmopolitan approach to writing

Given my own understanding of writing as an ethical, imaginative and rhetorical endeavour, I have been drawn to the critical turn in cosmopolitanism, and its pertinence to doing writing and deliberating on writing in the globalised context of the twenty-first century. This orientation appreciates the social, political, economic and cultural ambivalences, obstacles, inequities and competing interests involved in the normative obligation to write responsibly to and in relation to locally and globally situated others, in public and professional contexts. Nevertheless, on this view, a writer has always also to be a different reader, in other words a self-critical and reflexive reader of her own and others’ writing practices, aware of the ways in which textual meanings and interpretations must be contested, contestable, transformative and transformable. Although my work is conceptual and theoretical, its understanding of writing is as embedded and embodied social praxis. Thus, writing and the texts to which it gives rise are each inseparable from the material spaces and temporalities in which writing is developed and texts disseminated. Writing also constitutes a form of human subjectivity, however disguised that may be, since it necessarily addresses the other, even when indirectly, unwittingly or unwillingly. This pivotal, relational dimension of language calls up the ethical aspect, and, as I have mentioned, the questions of a writer’s obligations. In a cosmopolitan framework, the focus and extent of and the dialectical tensions between several and perhaps rival responsibilities to different (known and unknown) others becomes ever more part of the question of communicative practices in general and writing in particular, and this is a running theme in the pages that follow.

Moreover, the book is interested in exploring how the shifting of local and global boundaries also and necessarily influences and is influenced by the norms and conventions that guide, structure and focus our writing practices, wherever we write: in local online or offline community contexts, within or on behalf of organisational, institutional or corporate entities, or when representing government, private sector or non-government organisational interests. The boundaries that may delimit and expand writing approaches, practices and effects are grammatical, syntactical and semantic, as well as ethical and imaginative, discursive and rhetorical. And just as cosmopolitanism can motivate our reflections on and critique of the functions and effects of globalisation in terms of our relationships with others, so can it be harnessed to consider, question and adapt our writing both alongside and in dialectical relation to other texts (visual, oral, aural and multimodal) in a globalised world. Therefore, the chapters that follow all aim to investigate how writers working in contemporary environments – government, corporate, community, non-government and organisational – might navigate, through critical reflection and deliberation, the times, the spaces and the margins that influence and shape the texts they produce in their communicating with others.

Structure of the book

Chapter 2 lays out the conceptual and theoretical framework by which the discussions in the following chapters are shaped. I define the critical cosmopolitan approach, shaping and adapting it for my purpose in reflecting on specific writing activities and writing moments, and using the lens to deepen and extend the insights to be contributed by the ethical, imaginative, discursive and rhetorical dimensions of writing. The ethical questions that arise for writers, particularly those in positions of relative privilege, power and reach, have both local and global import. For example, even if we write for a specific and circumscribed readership, how should our writing take account of the larger ramifications of our texts in other contexts, for other people, places and times? Even, and perhaps particularly, in relation to unknown (distant and different) others, how might we imagine and negotiate, through our writing, our obligations to care for those others? How does situating our texts in a global context result in them meaning differently, being interpreted otherwise, and how far does our writing allow for those possibilities? In other words, how do the discourses and the rhetoric we deploy expand or shrink the horizons of our interactions with or in relation to others? By tracing and drawing together the key conceptual and theoretical threads, the chapter helps us to think more clearly about these questions, and ways of approaching them in the discussions that follow.

The growing sophistication, speed and spread, as well as commercialisation, of new communications technologies, including social media, mean that many of us in the developed world, and increasingly in some parts of the developing world, are transcending the borders of space and time in communicating with others. Chapter 3 explores the ways in which writing within the network neither promises nor precludes the opportunities to democratise or make more inclusive our writing exchanges. In a culture of visuality, where screen and spectacle may readily engage but also distract our attention, I examine the role of writing, in terms of opening up the spaces for better understanding of self–other relations as well as, alternatively, maintaining the distance of those who may threaten our security or sense of self-containment. Critical cosmopolitanism can alert us to the tensions inherent in interacting with diverse individuals, groups and communities, and tempers any naïve faith in the Internet as a borderless and neutral domain. However, it also helps us to recognise the ways in which writing approaches and practices might mobilise and alternatively treat the visual as a means of forging and extending relationships with others across difference in order to effect positive social change.

Implicit if not explicit in Chapter 3 is the idea that virtual and material worlds are enmeshed and interdependent. Nonetheless, and to mitigate against any illusion that our writing floats in the ether, Chapter 4 brings us firmly into the dialectical territory of writing’s formal (grammatical and functional) and material (social and relational) dimensions. Its aim is to draw ethical and imaginative parallels between, on the one hand, writing and making sense of the sentence as a process of recasting the complex relationship between us and them, belonging and exclusion and, on the other hand, articulating the meanings of citizenship and national identity through particular discursive and rhetorical strategies. The previous chapter suggests that the network has the potential to disrupt, subvert or reshape borders, even if it cannot dissolve them. Although a significant challenge, this ushers in the prospect of writing a cosmopolitan openness to difference and change. Nonetheless, and in reaction to the apparent (economic and security) risks brought about by the movement of peoples across state lines, many governments around the world regard reasserting the political, ideological and geographical strength of nation state borders as one of their key practical and communicative responsibilities. They do this in part by claiming the coterminous nature of national identity and citizenship. Therefore, Chapter 4 demonstrates how the sentence can be read as dramatising both the commixture and the tension between local and global, self and other, us and them, as illustrated in the documents designed to prepare candidates for a citizenship test. Both writing and citizenship practices in a globalised world articulate the scope and limits of our obligations. However, both practices also involve an ongoing reappraisal of who we are and how we might become (other) in relation to those whom we address and those we marginalise or elide. The chapter argues that governments, as state representatives, are thus obliged to choose their words carefully.

Cosmopolitanism does not, however, only help us to deliberate on writing activities that are preoccupied with the tensions arising between local selves and distant or “foreign” others. In this sense critical cosmopolitanism certainly begins at home, as globalisation continues to manifest itself and to have particular impacts on the ways in which we live and work differently, and the ways in which change becomes a constant in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introducing a Cosmopolitan Orientation to Writing
• 2. Conceptualising the Cosmopolitan Approach to Writing
• 3. Writing in the Network
• 4. Sentencing: Reflecting on Words and Worlds
• 5. Rewriting Organisational Change
• 6. The Multinational Corporation – Writing Cosmopolitan Responsibility?
• 7. Conclusion: Imagining the Cosmopolitan
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index